Philosophy and Human Values (1990) By Rick Roderick
http://rickroderick.org/
Socrates and the Life of Inquiry (1990)
Transcript: A course in philosophy and human values may seem paradoxical because philosophy was that discipline, in our traditions – that’s western traditions, western civilisation – that began with a search for unconditioned knowledge. Unconditioned by human knowledge, of things that transcend this world or any other. That tradition is very much alive in philosophy today, mostly in formal logic and mathematics, where it seems in place, and professional philosophers have a name for that tradition. It’s the “analytic” tradition in philosophy. A course in philosophy and human values has very little to gain from that tradition. And the reason for that, I think, is quite simple. It’s because philosophy and its interaction with societies, cultures, and in its historical context is very difficult to quantify. It’s very difficult to turn into a logical formula. And as a matter of fact no-one – I think, and I have met a lot of philosophers, since that’s what I do for a living – has ever demonstrated that a deductive argument, a logical argument, one that’s purely formal, has ever solved a single philosophical problem. Except internally; the ones they made themselves. It’s kind of like housekeeping, where you spill the stuff, and then you clean it up, and then you spill it again… and a lot of analytic philosophy is like that. What I’d like to try today is to do something a little different. And that’s to place philosophy in a historical context, and then go through that and follow the mutation of problems, centered on what it means to be human. A question that, for me… will begin with a kind of skeptical attitude. In other words, we won’t begin as though we know what human nature is. A common, and I think absolutely insidious, kind of, fallacy promulgated – especially in a society like ours, that’s capitalist and so on – where subjects need to be of a certain kind in order to function in the state, and in the economy. So it’s important in a society like that to have a rigid definition of what “human being” is, for a whole host of reasons that I hope will become apparent. But I would like to begin with it as a kind of skeptical questioning. And so, I’ll come to my first topic. A book standardly used in introductory philosophy courses, and one that I will refer to only briefly today is “The Trial and Death of Socrates“, by a little known author named Plato. So if there are any members of the audience, or that are watching this that are worried about: “Is this going to be a talk, sort of… off of the standard texts?”, you know, “Some talk about, ah… the lesbian phallus in romantic novels”, don’t worry about it. We are going to be talking about Plato. So you know, you can relax, chill out, it’s not going to be… it’s not going to be a problem. Socrates inaugurates the western philosophical tradition in a very interesting way. And one of the ways he does it is by separating philosophical discourse, in a kind of a way, from scientific discourse. We can think of the earliest Greek philosophers: Thales, Anaximander and Anaxagoras and others, who studied the cosmos. And I think you are familiar with the word cosmos from other famous television shows. I mean, you’ve heard Carl Sagan: “Cosmos…”. You know, and that’s kind of the way you need to say it for the Greeks too because we get other English words from “cosmos”, for example: “cosmetic”. Where, for the Greeks, the cosmos was sort of cosmetic; it appeared, and that was enough. And it appeared to be harmonious and beautiful and orderly. That made it an object of study. If it had appeared chaotic to them, it wouldn’t have been an object of study. It was its order that made it possible to study it. And we know from – at least we think we know – from the texts, that when Socrates was young he studied in this tradition and was interested in the cosmos, in what things were made of. And the Greeks had rather simple answers. Things were made of fire, some thought of water, some thought of earth, fire, water and air, and various other accounts. And for a rather long time in western civilisation the account that there were four elements: earth, fire, water, and air was the dominant scientific account for a long time. In any case, Socrates began in this tradition, but he inaugurates philosophy in the spirit in which I hope that I am going to talk about it for the next few hours. By changing the focus away from the investigation into the movements of stars and the composition of the earth, and directs the investigation of philosophy towards human beings. And this should be well known. I mean, it’s an ordinary thing to know about Socrates. “Know thyself”, for Socrates, was the beginning of wisdom, and Socrates – for him – this was more than a mere motto. All the Socratic dialogues are in a sense… it’s important to understand first that they are dialogues. They are written in dialogic form. In Greek society – and this will be my first amature sociological remark – in Greek society, knowledge comes to be in a public place, where reasoned arguments have to take place in the open; in a public forum. That’s to be greatly contrasted – just by point of contrast – with a society like ours, where most of the important arguments that shape our destiny are secret. In Greek society, that’s unthinkable because a polis is a place where the only force that a free person is supposed to recognise, is that peculiar unforced force of the better argument. That’s what differentiates you from a slave. You don’t argue with slaves in Greek society, they obey, and you tell them. But when it’s a discussion among free citizens, they can’t recognise your force as part of the argument. It has to be that strange unforced force that happens, when someone just convinces you with an argument that you… “Oh wow, I think that’s better than my argument. I think you’re right”. So, the dialogues are built on that form of political life. Where dialogue is essential to knowledge. Later in the course when we discuss the rise of modern society, we will get a peculiar new way of human beings understanding themselves. A way that I will attach the name Descartes to right now. A way where you sort of introspect and figure things out. Sort of a forerunner to Shirley Maclaine, except more sophisticated [crowd laughter]. You kind of introspect and sort of talk to your own inner self. Well for the Greeks, this was no way to achieve knowledge. It was through talking with other people, and I don’t want to make this sound sort of too – I don’t know – “prep schooly“, because if you read the dialogues, Socrates is flirting with both the men and the women that he talks to. He mostly talks to men, this is western tradition, right? The women, I guess are doing the housework and showing up, you know, in the jail cell when he’s about to die and stuff, and whining or whatever… however these guys wrote it. You know, it’s why I am a little dubious about some of the text. In any case. The two important points that I hope that I have sort of moved around: One, Socrates turns the investigation of philosophy towards human concerns, and away from the cosmos. And that already begins a fateful distinction that will later be discussed in – I guess the book was in the 40’s or whatever – C. P. Snow‘s book “The Two Cultures“, okay. The culture of science, and the culture of the humanities. That split has its origin in a way in Socrates turning his attention away from, sort of, one of the cultures; the culture that was going to investigate nature and human beings as though they were simply in it somewhere, and the culture that investigates human beings who are human. In other words, as human, as opposed to as one species among others or whatever. So that’s… and that makes knowing yourself a crucially important part of knowledge. Now I’ll make this as simple as I can. I love to use references to movies. You know, I mean not many of us read any more, but a lot of us go to movies. In Superman ONE okay – let’s get down to a real case, okay – in Superman 1, little baby superman is flying from the very sophisticated planet to earth, and there are all these knowledge crystals. And I didn’t like the series that much okay, so don’t frown at me. You know, it’s not that great a movie, I am just illustrating here. These knowledge crystals tell him all the known physics of this advanced civilisation, but the last and most precious crystal that he gets in the ship is symbolically important. Because now that you know all this – you know, all these things – you may want to know what is most important. And that’s who you are. And so the last crystal is supposed to give him the Socratic style of knowledge. So Socrates believed… I mean this is a nice illustration, because Socrates believed that one could have ALL the other kinds of knowledge, and be totally lost – totally aimless – if one didn’t have the other kind of knowledge, which was knowledge of one’s self. And this is nice to remember today, I think. It’s a cautionary tale, because we live today in a society saturated with information. Just… information… which I would want to radically distinguish from wisdom or knowledge… but just saturated with information. But I think in our society, the Socratic question is not only difficult to answer, but even a sense for its importance is being lost. We are just saturated with information. We are told so frequently who we are, given a certain set of roles that are pre-arranged, pre-established, and within which in a free society one is able to vary slightly. In other words, to give you an example: we all know what a yuppie is, but we know that within that category that there is some variation possible. You could be sandy haired or red haired. You could wear black Reeboks or white ones. I mean, you know, there is a little… But this is… I am trying to give you a sense for the strange distance between – historical distance – between the Socratic search for wisdom, and this kind of way of finding out who you are. It’s very different. It’s a very different thing. Okay, well, let’s see. Should I finally throw in an argument? No, not yet. Socrates… in the dialogues, his primary antagonists are called the Sophists. And the best historical analogy for the Sophists… and I don’t like to use the word like most philosophers do – as a pejorative – because the word “Sophist”… ah, they were simply folks who went around and they taught things. They taught how to do well in the market place: “business school”. They taught how to win your cases in the law court: “law school”. You know. They taught how to run the state well: “public policy” at Duke, or wherever. So, you know… I mean, they went around and they got paid for doing this. In fact, it’s interesting that at the trial of Socrates his one defence that’s really convincing that he’s not a Sophist, is that he doesn’t get paid to teach. Of course, under that rubric, in our society we are all Sophists, right? Everybody in front of every podium at university is a Sophist. Whether they belong to the National Association of Scholars or not, they are still getting paid, and the presumption by at least some Greeks was that if you got paid to say something, it was… to be taken with a great deal of suspicion. So that was a defence of Socrates. Well, the Sophists had a general view that backed it up that I think today, again, is a view that we can understand in our own time. The Sophist position is stated variously by various Sophists. I am not going to run through the various ones. In most of the dialogues, Socrates… his interlocutor will be one of them. In most of the Socratic dialogues, he will be talking to one of these people. But Protagoras was the best known Sophist, and his view has come down and has become very famous, and it is that “man is the measure of all things”. Now, that is an ambiguous statement. It’s one that Socrates wanted to point out the ambiguity in. “Man is the measure of all things” can be read – in a modern era that sounds like – “individuals”. A constructed historical category by the way. “Individuals” are the locus of knowledge. You have heard that argument, I am sure, in regard to art. For example, someone will say: “Well, you know… I don’t know what art is, but I know what I like”, and that’s a knockdown argument in art, a lot of us think. You know. I happen to like Mel Gibson’s Hamlet. You know. It’s weird, I like it, but… And that’s supposed to be a knockdown argument. On this argument by the Sophists though, knowledge is impossible. Because each individual will have – just like a nose – an opinion, and a right to it, and no-ones’ will be more right than the other. That’s one way to understand his position. Another, more sophisticated way to understand Protagoras is for him to be saying something like this: “Each tribe or cultures’ standards of knowledge will be the standards that will hold for that tribe or that culture”. That’s a more sophisticated version of what some philosophers like to call relativism. Now Socrates is a very peculiar person – and I’ll connect this back up with human values in a minute – because Socrates won’t accept either version of the relativist argument. And in our context, one would think that would make him a dogmatist. I mean, because we are all, I think, immersed in a culture of what I might call sophomoric relativism. By that I mean, we go: “Well, that’s my opinion, damnit!”. You know, sort of, like interviewing someone for USA Today: “Well, that’s what I think, damn it!”, “Let a nuke over Baghdad, damn it!” [crowd laughter]. You know. And… Old Henry goes, “Well, that’s Old Bill’s opinion, y’know… I respect that”. And in a democracy, we are supposed to be democratic about knowledge, you know. Right? Well, everybody’s got a right to be a damn fool. And I am not opposed to that necessarily. I just want to point out that that doesn’t end debate, right. I mean, you can still argue with Old Henry, or Old Harry, or Old Sam… You can tell I have been in North Carolina for too long from these names [crowd laughter]. Anyway… Socrates’ position was that the relativists had to be wrong, but it didn’t follow from that that Socrates himself had to know the absolute truth. In other words, Socrates thought that he absolutely knew there must be some truths that were absolutely important for human beings, without making the further claim that he knew what they were. See, the further claim is what I like to call the Jerry Falwell claim: “I am not a relativist, there are absolute truths, and by God, I know them”. Where the “by God” is more than a mere, you know, conjoining there. I mean it’s really: “by God I know them”. Well, Socrates held a position that was neither one of these: “There must be absolute truths, but I myself don’t possess them”. Now, that gives the explanation. And I am sure all of you have read a Socratic dialogue at one time or another. Most people have been forced to at one time or another, right? Kind of peculiar, but most people have been forced to read one. And, it’s irritating to read this old man’s questioning. We need to remember Socrates was very ugly, according to the busts, you know, of his face. Kind of like me: sort of short, fat, ugly, irritating person [crowd laughter]. And as Nietzsche said, “To be ugly in Greece was already an objection” [crowd laughter]. You know. And, I mean, I guess that’s where the modern word for Greeks comes from, on university campuses, right? Because the show up ugly is already… you know… you’re out. So to be ugly in Greece was already an objection. Socrates was a fat, ugly, little guy. As I say, he engaged in this practice of questioning, and it’s irritating to read them, because you go, “Oh, well, those are just… those questions just run in circles”. Have you ever got that feeling, when you were reading them? “It’s just silly”, you know, “that’s not getting anywhere”. It’s a kind of an American response, you know. “Well, what’s he getting at?”, you know, “and when is he going to get around to it?”. Well, the Socratic procedure in the dialogues may not be to get around to anything. Just the pure charm and beauty of the talk may itself contain a glimmer of truth or transcendence. It’s not necessary in all the dialogues that he get to something. I mean, the power of thought, just for its own autonomy, and its own beauty, might be something the Greeks were interested in, and conversation, for its own sake. We are a little too busy now for that kind of thing. But just for its own sake, it might be interesting. So, Socrates held this position – as I say, a middle ground position – which is that there must be absolute truths, but he didn’t know them. Why that’s important, is that gives a reason for the dialogues. When Socrates questions people about beauty, honour, justice, truth – I finally mentioned the big words philosophy is after, right, you know. When he talks about them… and they all sound like pompous words today. I just feel crazy, you know, discussing philosophy today. Because, in a society, sort of, where – as one modern philosopher put it – cynical reason prevails, the very use of these words is bound to just sound like advertising slogans. That’s the objective context within which people who try to teach what I teach have to fight a kind of historical battle. Because, I mean, how in the hell can I compete with… well… I am on television right now, “hello”… ah, no. How can I compete a huge media and advertising industry that uses these same words that used to code the most important things about human beings, as the characteristics of products, which you can get in a mediated way by consuming them. See, it’s just so difficult then to re-establish, sort of, their meaning. But for Socrates it was crucially important to try to get at the meanings of these words: truth, beauty, goodness, courage, justice, and so on. And it was important not only for its own sake, but for what it would tell him about himself and about his fellow citizens. So, it was a profoundly civic act. Thus, when Socrates was found guilty at his trial, he suggested that the state should not execute him, or even send him to exile, but rather should put him up as a public figure to be supported by the state forever, for the service he performed for it. Okay? Which at a Greek trial was not a good counter-sentence [crowd laughter]. That was liable to irritate the Jury, right. You know, it could really tick off the Jury. It didn’t seem to hurt in the Olly North affair, but you know, Socrates probably didn’t have that good a speech coach or whatever. In any case, let me give the argument that Socrates gives against relativism. Because it’s one of our little philosophical tricks we learn from him, and may itself be a piece of Sophistry. But, against people like Protagoras, Socrates would argue as follows, and this is probably familiar to at least some of you. He would take the proposition – “the truth”, for example being one important concept – “the truth is relative”. About which he would ask Protagoras: “Is the sentence you just uttered – ‘the truth is relative’ – itself a relative truth, or an absolute one?”. Well, if Protagoras or some other Sophist responds that its an absolute one, then there is such a thing as absolute truth, and they’ve discovered at least one of them: that the truth is relative. On the other hand, if the truth is relative, then if you hold Socrates’ view that there is such a thing as absolute truth, you are absolutely right too. You see how the dilemma works? Either way the relativist responds, a space is opened up in which it’s possible to search for truths that transcend the here and now. Because… even if there is one absolute truth – that there aren’t any – so then you might begin to say, “Well, there might be others. You figured out one, maybe I could too”. On the other hand, if you respond the other way, then at least a view like Socrates’ is still absolutely right, because everybody is absolutely right. Of course Socrates is too. So this famous, sort of, self-referential problem continues to this day to be a sort of thorn in the side of what I would call “Sophomoric Relativism”. It really is a problem, for that position. Okay, back again now to the human meaning of the Socratic project. And now I am going to do just a little biography, which is not really… well, biography of this kind is supposed to have some kind of philosophic import. Not only was Socrates ugly and sort of a pain in the behind, but the people that he questioned on the various topics in order to find out more about himself – and about his fellow citizens – were experts. And this is another point where I will like to contrast us with modern society. It’s really hard to imagine a citizen publicly confronting Dan Quayle, and being allowed to go on for thirty minutes on the… well since Quayle reads “The Republic”, he reads Plato, so he ought to be able to do this, right? What is it? He tries to read Plato, that’s I guess… that’s different. But anyway, to get a Socratic parallel, you would need to imagine another free citizen encountering him, and going: “What is statesmanship?”. See, all the Socratic dialogues are sort of – the Socratic ones, Plato writes other, later dialogues – the Socratic dialogues are all of the form: “What is X?”, where the X in question will be one of these important words to human beings. So you go, “What is statecraft, or politics?”, and he will go to someone who is understood to be an expert by the society – I mean they will be – in that. If its courage, he’ll go to a General, and ask: “What is courage?”. Now, I think how Socrates got in trouble – other than being ugly and irritating – was that as he questioned these people, it became apparent that they didn’t have the faintest idea of what the hell they were doing. Which is a feeling I get every time I walk into a mall. I look at people and I would like to just say something like: “What are you doing?”, and you know, after you get the word “shopping”, what the hell do you suppose they’d say? “Well, it’s Saturday, and everybody’s gotta be somewhere…” [crowd laughter], and you know… I mean, Socrates would, like, nail you and keep going with that “What are you doing?” question. Where “What are you doing?” carried the connotations of more than just right now, but, “What are you doing with your life?”, “What is it about?”, “Does it have a theme?”, “Is there anything important going on?”. Which is an even more important question today, when the planet is full of more people, right?, than have lived in the whole previous history of the world. We need an answer to that, just to justify taking up the amount of air we do. There are so many people on the globe, we are in somebody’s way right now. So, it’s good to have an answer to the question of “What the hell are you doing?”. So, philosophy… I’d like to start this course with the banal question that we should at least try to develop some answer on our own life to a question as simple as “What the hell am I doing?”. And, you would be surprised. I mean some of you go: “Well, I know what I’m doing”. Well Socrates’ presumption was that if you thought about it long enough, you wouldn’t be so sure. You wouldn’t be so sure about it. In any case, I was talking about how he got in trouble… and trying to get into a little trouble too, maybe. Socrates would confront a General, a Statesman, a Poet, you know, a great Artist: “What’s great art?” Well, we know the kind of answers you get there, if you ever read the interviews with William Faulkner. Aren’t we all glad that he wrote… that he didn’t know what he was doing? Because if he was doing what he said in his interviews he was doing, the books would have been just… eckkkk. But, because he didn’t know what he was doing, we were lucky, the books were great. Thank God they are not as stupid as what he said about them [crowd laughter]. See? And Socrates would ask a poet: “What are you doing?”, and the poet would say some completely off-the-wall stuff. And thank goodness they expressed themselves as poets and not… didn’t have to explain themselves. But the Socratic drive was to get people to explain themselves. Now, a social thing had happened in Greece that was unfortunate for Socrates was that the young would gather around to listen to these conversations. And, you can imagine a scene something like this. With some young people gathered around Dan Quayle – forced not to leave, and nobody to pull him away – in a thirty minute discussion with (at least) a clever person like Socrates, about Statecraft. One can imagine a sort of, 15 or 16 year old today raised on Public Enemy and MTV, the kind of hilarity that might arise, and the irritation that Quayle might feel, trapped in such a situation. He would consider it “trapped”, but for the Greeks, it would be of the essence of being a free person to be in a situation of dialogue like that. In any case, that’s another difference. In any case… this got him into a lot of trouble, and was another factor that led up to the rather dramatic title of this book – which is really a collection of the various dialogues – about “The Trial and Death of Socrates”, which led up to his trial and subsequently being sentenced to death. So philosophy has, in terms of human values, I think, a rather noble beginning. It begins on a quest for meanings that transcend the here and now. These, for me, are not necessarily universal, and certainly have more to say about local conditions than universal ones. I do think we can make historical comparisons, I have been doing that pretty routinely up here. But he thought that these questions had something profoundly important to tell us about what human beings… were. Now, one further point that I want to make about Socrates and about the Greek way of life, as it will be presented throughout here. And this is by way of sort of distancing myself from a rather standard presentation of Socrates. We now know, that what are called “the Greeks”, and what I have been referring to as “The Greeks”. We know that from the scholarship of African Americans and others, that this was largely – and my whole lecture has been based on this text, and I don’t mind evoking these Greek values, because I think they are still very important, but you should have this note of suspicion – and that’s that largely it was 19th century German scholarship that as it were, invented the Greeks for us. I mean, at one time, they were just, you know, like in the 16th century, they were one among other earlier civilisations, you know. The 19th century Germans, I don’t know if you know this, were extremely impressed with the Greeks. It’s kind of obvious if one looks at their art or reads their literature, right? They were very impressed with the Greeks, and what they found out about them. In any case, the Greeks as understood today, through that tradition is the only possible topic that I could bring up here. Because in a certain sense – and this is not a relativist argument – the past is only accessible through readings and reinterpretations of the past, in the absence of a time machine. I mean, I think that’s at the basis of our wonderful time machine fantasy about history. Is all of us would kind of like to know what it was really like. You know. What was it really like. The trouble with the past is it’s kind of like the present. We don’t know. I mean, we don’t know what it was really like. And our further worry is that even if we had been there, the odds that people who have been socialised to speak an informational language, not to seek these things that are advertising slogans to us. It’s very doubtful we would understand what the hell was going on if we were there. It might sound as peculiar as it does to my students to be forced to read these things… I mean, “What the devil is that? All this time talking about beauty? About goodness? I mean, good grief”. I would like to now make a historical point about something that philosophers today are more aware of than they used to be, and which is important. Not all kinds of inquiry can appear in just any setting. There are conditions for the possibility of certain questions being asked. And in the case of Greek society, they went along with a relatively unproblematic discourse for quite a while, especially during the very high days of their empire, when their empire was in a really secure position. In that social setting, and under those social conditions, there was no Socrates, and no condition for the possibility of there being one. And here is why. Because in the sort of classic Greek language, the one that comes out of, you know, the oral tradition of Homer and others, it would be insane to ask something like “What is courage?”, because the response – which many of you may have had in the back your mind as I was speaking – would be: “Don’t you have a dictionary?”. In other words, we all know what it means. We have got a cohesive society. We are unified, it’s like about the war now, we’re all together on this. We know what courage is. So there would have been no space for the Socratic inquiry. It was only after a rather unpleasant experience in a war. Greek war, someone may know about it. Kind of a famous war. Good journalists back then too: Thucydides, fairly decent journalist. Could have got a job with “The Post”, probably [crowd laughter]. Ah, but after a tragic experience with the war, and a military dictatorship, the words that had become standard in their culture, and had been used unproblematically with meanings attaching to definite positions, began to be sources of irritation. And so, the ground and the possibility for Socrates’ inquiry was not really his individual genius, although that itself is a nice thing, and I am not against it. But it was not possible except against a background of a society that had deeply begun to question what these words really meant. And one can’t help but think – for example, to try to make this parallel come alive – that the radical questioning that has been going on in the universities about the cannons of knowledge, the instruments of knowledge, has not been profoundly affected – as Time magazine admits – but no… it’s clear that the current, struggle over the cannon and the meaning of these classic texts, all of which… I have selected only classic texts for this course. I am not going to read them necessarily, or discuss them in necessarily a classic way. But the point of all this questioning is that after this countries’ experience in the 50’s and the 60’s of both the civil rights movement and anti war movement, counter culture, and so on, it became again a problem to say: “What does it mean to be, for example, a good woman?”. Well, there was something, sort of, in 1951 that that meant that clearly is a matter of debate now. Okay. Is that clear, is that a good example? It’s pretty clear. Well, I’ll pick one that is a little more controversial. “What’s a patriot?” became a matter of debate. In, sort of, 1954, it was not all that confusing. And I am old enough to remember people not being confused by it. I think people want it to not be non confusing again, desperately. They may want it more than they want even money, which is amazing. But the point is that philosophy – philosophical inquiry, of the dangerous kind, as opposed to of the analytic, boring, academic kind – philosophic inquiry of the dangerous kind catches a society at a moment when it’s insecure about what the main terms that hold it together mean. Like man, woman, patriot, and in particular: “human being”. So that is the human edge of philosophy. It’s that you catch society at a moment of danger when a term or a set of terms that are very important to the identity of a lot of people are in question. Or possible. That the questioning of it is at least possible. It may be that we are today. And since I am trying to remind myself as I talk about eternal values – and not being a relativist – and I do think its important to search for values that transcend the here and now. On the other hand, in the time since Socrates, we have become more dubious about eternal ones. Me too. We are all more dubious about those. But I would like to look for values that transcend the here and now, and for obvious reasons. The obvious reason in my case being that I think the ones that prevail here and now suck [crowd laughter]. Good English word… right? We all know what that means. By the way, it’s interesting to note – sidebar here, for you amature philosophers who want to read more books of this kind – most of the texts are translated to get those kinds of words out of them. But the language spoken by Socrates, as recorded by Plato, is a quite… is not a fancy language just filled with technical terms, but is a pretty ordinary Greek. And it’s only later, sort of, mid 20th century or early 20th century, when philosophy starts to develop a “professionalised” vocabulary. See, in all its previous history it tried to communicate with at least some class of people. It’s only recently that it tries to communicate with no-one [crowd laughter]. I mean, the Journal of Philosophy. If twelve people go down on the same flight, there won’t be any more Journal of Philosophy. Because its eleven guys writing to this other guy [crowd laughter]. And that’s… so… What I am trying to do today is to broaden out the interest of philosophy a little more than that, to the extent that it means anything more than another niche in an intellectual marketplace already filled up with so much garbage, you’d be lucky… it’s kind of like a big sale. You are lucky to find the scarf you want ’cause it’s just filled with crappy scarves, and there’s one you might want. And so, all I can do is to make philosophy and it’s kind of enquiry insofar as it’s critical, insofar as it catches society at a moment of danger, insofar as it asks us who we are, and who our fellow citizens are. I want to make that look important, like an attractive scarf in the pile. I’d like to be able to give it more punch than that, but then I’m speaking in the here and now. In quite a dark moment of the history of this country, in my opinion. One I would discuss at length, and I will in the question period, and outside in the hall, and in public forums, to the extent that it’s still allowed to do so. In the first lecture, I wanted to just introduce you to some of the themes I’ll pursue throughout the lectures. “What does it mean…” – and the grand theme, one that I certainly won’t answer as these lectures progress is – “What does it mean to be a human being?”. I will try to localise the question. Today I have tried to say what it was like – in a way – what was it like, how did the Greeks understand a certain set of human practices. And I have said almost nothing about it, except about the practice of Socrates. So, as we go through these lectures, I’m going to lay out various – what I will call – ways of living. And the Socratic way is one of critical inquiry. And this shouldn’t be understood in the way we understand inquiry today. As just sitting on your butt and looking through a microscope. No. Inquiry in Socrates’ sense, critical inquiry, is to go around in a kind of passionate search. For what’s really important. Where that itself is up for grabs. It’s not like you know what that is for sure. Socrates doesn’t just ask “What is truth, beauty and the good?”, he has one dialogue where he asks: “What’s fine?”. And the best translation would, sort of, be the English “fine” in the sense of: “Boy, you’re fine”, “Isn’t that finnee”. And, so that doesn’t sound like truth or beauty. The dialogue is about “what’s fine?”. So, I mean, Socrates goes around looking for these things, in order to get a fix on what is important about being human. What’s special about it. In order, also, finally, to disprove the Delphic Oracle who when asked “Who was the wisest man in the world?” said: “Socrates”. And this was reported to him, and he went: “This is nuts, can’t be true, I don’t know anything”. And he finally figured out the riddle of the oracle. He was only the wisest man in Greece, because he not only didn’t know anything, but he had a meta-belief about that. He knew that he didn’t know anything. Very important distinction. And as I make some of the rather dogmatic remarks that I am going to make through the lecture, I should make my own position as a philosopher clear. I am not a relativist and I am not an absolutist, in the sense in which I have discussed them today. I am a fallibilist. That means something like this. A fallibilist is someone who passionately believes certain things. Passionately believes certain things, some of them quite bizarre, as you’ll find out as we go along. But about those beliefs, I believe that they could be wrong. A peculiarly modern attitude, but one that I find myself forced to, through long, and bitter historical experience. Not only philosophical by the way, but historical in a more bloody and mundane sense. It seems only wise policy both philosophically, and politically to be able to hold a belief passionately, but to have a belief about that belief that it could be wrong. Some of you may think that that’s absolutely paradoxical. That if one must believe something passionately, then you have got to just believe it. And I hope that turns out to be wrong, because it doesn’t seem to make me feel any more schizophrenic that the rest of you [crowd laughter] to both know I hold a series of beliefs quite deeply, and yet to have a belief about them at another order, that they could be wrong. I mean, I hope that that will work. Anyway. In any case, that’s not a bad characterisation of the position of fallibilism. And I am a fallibilist about fallibilism. Let me go ahead and go a little further, which means that that whole stance could be wrong. So, I am a fallibilist all the way down, see, because even that way of looking at knowledge could be wrong, and so on. And to be philosophical is not to stop pursuing the question when it becomes inconvenient. It is the opposite, in that sense. The kind of inquiry I want to pursue is kind of the opposite of a televised news conference. Where everyone knows the limits of questioning, and obeys without question like slaves and lackeys. Beneath the level of humanity, of free human beings. Ought to make us ashamed. But philosophy doesn’t behave in that way. Not at its best. It has been known to. In fact, like religion, it has frequently served the powers that be. I am trying to pick out a certain group of philosophers that at their best, don’t do that, okay. At their best they question radically. I want to distinguish that from say, a news conference, where the spectrum of questions are quite simple and very, very prescribed. And, moreover, the answers are already written. And we could supply them without waiting for the parties to answer. If you watch enough of this stuff, I mean, I’m… I have become a CNN junkie. So now, I can just give the report before they give it. I can just say: “Well, what happened in the war today?” – “We won!” [crowd laughter]. Short summary of the news: “Lots of them died, not many of us did. We won”. You know. I mean, I heard that for seven years, earlier in my life: “There’s a light at the end of the tunnel”. Well, whenever you see a light at the end of the tunnel, philosophy reminds you that there is at least the dim possibility that the light at the end of the tunnel will turn out to be a cave… a candle at the end of a cave. I mean, that doesn’t mean it is going to come out the other side of anything worthwhile. Okay, Socrates. Know thyself. Ask embarrassing questions. And yet, try to avoid his fate, which is… don’t be tried, found guilty and executed, unless you are his age. So, I want to leave you with a sort of a joke about philosophy for this first lecture. And that’s that it’s a very interesting question whether Socrates would have escaped from prison – many of you know this story, I didn’t want to repeat it, and waste my 45 minutes – it’s a very interesting question about whether Socrates would have chosen to escape from prison, which was one of his choices, if he had been a 25 year old inquirer, as opposed to a 71-72 year old inquirer. It would have been very interesting. I think the choice would have been quite different. He might then have considered some of his friends’ plans to escape. Certainly we know that Aristotle later did. He fled Athens and said “I don’t want them to sin twice against philosophy”. And so that means that at some point I’ll have to leave Duke, so they don’t sin twice against irritating West Texans, who are just interested in reading philosophy books, although I wouldn’t say “just”. And I do think that the analogy that I would like to leave your attention on is that this kind of critical inquiry – if it can be carried out at all – can be carried out when societies are troubled. In other words, when the meanings of words become topics for debate and redefinition. And that’s not a matter of just debate, because the way we describe our lives and understand them is intimately and inextricably connected to the way we live them. You describe yourself as an insurance salesman – it’s okay, I’m not mad at any of you if you do that, but – if that’s all the description that you’ve got, that’s going to structure a certain kind of life. That set of descriptions, and those sets of beliefs. And I want to open up a possibility that there might be a way, even under these conditions to expand such definitions. Maybe not eternal ones, but localisable, and to be American in the last instance, usable ones.
Epicureans, Stoics, Skeptics (1990)
Transcript: Well, in the last lecture I tried to just make a few suggestive remarks in order to get us off the ground about what might be called “the Greek way of life”, and different forms of human conduct of which only one I suggested and discussed, and that was the Socratic life of enquiry. And I didn’t mean by that life of enquiry an inactive life, an apolitical life or one unconcerned with the state or with other humans. But, in fact, I wanted to present it not as some academic debate, but as a life deeply immersed in your social situation, and to understand who you are and who your fellow citizens are. Among the values that, Greek society held out as an answer – one possible localisable and possibly usable answer of what human life was like for the Greeks was, to sum it up in one word (and this is all I will have to say about Aristotle or Plato) – is “Excellence”. In a way, it’s well known that the Greeks have an ideal of Excellence. Where by Excellence, the Greeks meant something like this: to be an all rounder. You know, in sort of West Texas parlance, “an all rounder”. Somebody that, you know, could write a country song, punch out a big guy, shoot a game of pool, work a full days work, and was smart enough to read a thick book. And I don’t mean to make it too mundane, because if you look at the description of Odysseus in Greek literature, that was sort of an ideal of Excellence in their culture. And it’s not like our ideal, because Odysseus was, one, a clever liar, two, was someone who would cheat the gods when possible and necessary, who could drive a furrow, throw a discus, sail a boat, you know, and a bunch of things, right. And so for the Greeks, excellence was a whole series of traits of human beings, well rounded in all respects. One of the great Greek tragedians was buried, and his marker remarked on what a great soldier and orator he had been. It said nothing about him winning the prize for the plays for which we know him today. So, the Greeks had this idea of excellence, which to us can only be a pale shadow in a society where we mean something so radically different by excellence. By excellent, we would have to mean – and perforce have to mean – an excellent lawyer, an excellent politician, an excellent housewife. I’d rather say worker. An excellent houseworker. It’s hard to say “worker” when they are unpaid labour, but, houseworker, and so on. So Excellence, in a society in which labour is greatly divided can only be, as it were, a pale shadow of this Greek ideal, okay. That doesn’t mean that you can’t be excellent at your job, and learn to ski. But the Greeks meant a bit more by it than that. So, what we will pursue now, in a discussion that unfortunately has to be far too brief, will be ideals of Excellence in Roman society, and I am going to run through those. Some of them are fairly well known to us today. So I am going to run through a few of those ideals of human excellence. Again, localisable to the Roman Empire, again, very Western. You know, all traditional, no problem there. And then I will end with a little intimation of something I will try to pick up on again at the end of the lecture. Even though Christianity as a form of belief dominated Western civilisation for so long, I am going to have very little to say about it in the early part of the lectures, for a reason I’ll give you toward the end of this one. Okay. So now, to move from the Greeks to the Romans. There are three different views I want to discuss in terms of how to conduct ones life and two of them bear a nice historical parallel with conditions in the Roman Empire and its fate. One of the positions with which many of you are familiar – at least in name – because the word, although it means something slightly different today, this position is probably familiar. One of the answers to “how to live?”, given during the rise of the Roman Empire, when the markets were filled with goods, and there was much to enjoy. Even for some of the Plebeians there was much to enjoy, because Rome was looting the world. Maybe some of you understand this condition from your experience. I don’t know, but anyway. It was a good time in philosophy: it was Hedonism. Now, it’s important to understand that philosophers of the old school make a living refuting Hedonism. Because how could a view about what is the best kind of life for humans, or the right thing to do – and I’d like to make this simpler by just using Spike Lee‘s phrase – how could “do the right thing” mean “do what makes you happy”. But actually, this view is harder to refute than one might think. Because in answer to the problems of life, the Hedonist response that you should do what makes you happy is actually a fairly powerful view, I think. Now, I think that it’s more powerful under conditions where it’s possible to do that, for obvious reasons. Now, the Hedonists back up their arguments with two kinds of claims, and we’ll return to this again when we get a kind of modern form of social Hedonism in John Stuart Mill. But the Hedonism of the Roman Empire was connected with various schools: the Epicureans, and others (where we get the word Epicure). That ought to already tell you something about the kinds of pleasures to be pursued. And this will be disappointing to many of you. The kinds of pleasures the Epicureans wanted to pursue – and nearly every version of Hedonism makes this distinction – were the “higher” pleasures. By which they meant the ones that don’t have the negative payback. The higher pleasures are, as the word “epicure” indicates: excellent food in moderate quantity. Like swordfish, steak, just right, blackened a little, yuppified just a little. A little picante sauce, which has become quite popular. Tex-Mex variant. Just enough though to be healthy, good for the heart. A little running. And these things in moderation. A little learning, but not too much. Not enough to trouble the mind, but enough to satisfy it [crowd laughter]. On the other hand, one wouldn’t indulge in those pleasures that have a strong negative side. I mean, this is the way the philosophical position is. Myself, I have always wanted some Hedonist to just come out and say “I am for the really gritty ugly pleasures, I like them” [crowd laughter], but that’s not a view… I want to defend partially that view, but it’s not a view that is, you know, philosophically respectable, although it may even be more plausible. No, the lower pleasures are things like getting dog drunk, which provides a lot of pleasure, until the next morning. Then you have got a lot of pain. Falling dumbly in love. Which provides a lot of pleasure, and then gives a lot of pain. These were to be avoided because they led to a troubled mind. So, those pleasures were, as it were… not… this was a very rational position, see. The idea is to maximise ones pleasure, so you follow the most rational course to do that. You go after “higher pleasures” that don’t have a bad down side, and avoid the so called “lower pleasures” that have this down side. A good drunk… Again, our culture is familiar with this: “just say no to drugs”. Well, the reason for that can’t be that they don’t make you feel good. You know, I’m an old 60’s person, and I know better [crowd laughter]. They make you feel good! But they have a downside. So, I am not arguing – don’t charge the stage – I am not saying “say yes to drugs”. I am just saying you’d be a fool to say “They don’t make you feel good”. They do make you feel good. You gotta be… you got to tell the truth about things once in a while. It won’t hurt. Even in Reagan and Bush’s America it doesn’t hurt to tell the truth once in a while. Just don’t get caught by your friends, okay [crowd laughter]. Ah, in any case, the problem with drugs though, is that they have this down side. You know, the “Cocaine Blues” is a familiar, not only country song, but phenomena. Way up, way down. This view of seeking pleasure was quite widespread in a period when Rome has a lot of pleasures to seek, booty from all over the world. During the decline of Rome, a rather different, view of the best kind of life for human beings arose – and I’ll discuss it briefly too and then we’ll compare them, because the comparisons are interesting – and that’s Stoicism. And just like Hedonism still means something like Hedonism to us, when we call someone a Stoic today, it still means something like what they meant by it: Stoic. Now, it’s important to see that there is a connection between these modes of beliefs, and the social and historical conditions that people are actually responding to when they formed these beliefs. So, when less booty is available in Rome, and Caligula is wasting a lot of it anyway – and scaring the hell out of you – one way to respond is the set of beliefs of Stoic fortitude. And the word… that was important for them and that they chose to model their way of life on, is not like for the Greeks’ Excellence, or for the Hedonists’ happiness. For the Stoics, the word was “Apatheia“. Now, I am saying it in its Latinate form, rather than in English, because if I say it in English, it’s “Apathy”, and you get the wrong idea. For the Stoics, Apatheia was something you cultivated. Unlike our society where they cultivate it for us, but then, I mean, you know… Apathy was something you cultivated, and it didn’t mean withdrawal, except in the sense of a courageous stance against, as it were, the buffeting powers of fate over which you had no control, so the best one could do was to “buck up”, and face a bad situation. Now, many of the Stoics… and I am oversimplifying to get the arguments clear. Certainly oversimplifying these two broad historical movements, but we have gotta make the positions clear. Some of the Stoics thought – with the Hedonists – that happiness would be the best thing, but they thought it was unattainable in this world. That’s a very important belief structure, given the next belief structure that will be historically dominant in Western Civilisation. It’s a very important switch in belief. It’s that now happiness is still considered to be something great if we could get it, but if you can’t, the next best thing is to face up to it. You know, “buck up”. An attitude with which I am still familiar, as I say, from my background in you know, sort of the Texas attitude toward a drought: “Well you can’t be happy living out here…” – “But damn it, they are not going to run me off this place” [crowd laughter]. Well, that’s kind of Stoic! There’s nothing apathetic about it, I mean, the wind blew all the crops away, his farm has gone 80 miles down the road, and you know, to be happy about it would be crazy. But you could face it with some kind of courage, some kind of fortitude. So that was the Stoic ideal. So, as I say, many of them believed that happiness would be good, but was not possible. So their arguments for that are based on two things, one of which you may have already caught me on – and I hope you have – is that for the Stoics, the distinction between higher and lower pleasures is dubious. Is questionable. Where do you really draw the line with that one, and why? I mean, are there any pleasures that don’t have a down side? And, for the Stoics, there aren’t. There are none. Even, you know, enjoying Beethoven’s Fifth requires lots of work to get into a position to enjoy it. You know, you don’t just walk in and go – well some people do, who like to bluff – they go: “Ain’t that great…”. It’s the first time they ever heard classical music: “Yeah, I love it…”. No, to really enjoy it, and to get pleasure from it, requires listening to a lot of things first. To really enjoy Moby Dick is more than just seeing the excellent movie by John Huston, written by Ray Bradbury. You have to actually read Moby Dick, and it’s long and there are sections in it about rendering whales, and its… that goes on about 200 pages and you’ve gotta get through them, they are important to the story. So that’s work, you know… So, for the Stoics, there is not this simple distinction between higher and lower pleasures. All pleasures have, as it were, a down side. All of them. And for people who try to lead a single minded life of happiness or pleasure – to set that out as their goal – may fall victim to an old Eastern Proverb from Eastern philosophy, and that’s that “Chasing happiness is like chasing your own shadow”. It’s almost as if one could get still, one might be able to find it, but it you keep chasing it, it’s always a little bit ahead. Well, the Stoics had some view like that about happiness. If you chase it, it runs. So, the Stoic answer was to lead this courageous life of, you know, it sounds a little corny, but it’s not any cornier than “Let’s buck up and take it” guys, sort of a male kind of thing, you know, I have to admit. Definitely, well, it’s sexist, like most of this tradition. In any case, that was the view, and it’s important to see when the two views were popular, and in what ways. One view corresponded to a rising empire and its values. The other view was more prevalent during the falling, or declining empire and with its values. So, in modern parlance, one might expect in a society on the ascendency to have all kinds of optimistic values. In that regard, let me quickly refer you to the commercials that were made in the 1950’s. Especially those 1950’s commercials that projected what life would be like in the year 1990. We are there now and we look back at those commercials, and guess what. They missed it, okay. It was wrong. They missed it. They missed it by a long way. You can even look at The Jetsons and go: they even missed that. They missed it. The future didn’t turn out to be like they imagined. Very optimistic account of the future. In this current period… to try to again, drive my analogy home about how ways of thinking and views of human conduct are rooted in real life problems, in real social and political problems. In our current period, in what form do we imagine our futures? One of the most striking examples to me here, are the new movies that I call “near future” movies. My favourite is Blade Runner. Now, Blade Runner – I don’t know how many of you have seen it – is a magnificent film for this simple reason. It is post-apocalyptic. Bored with the apocalypse. There’s not going to be a nuclear war because the world is not that interesting. See, that’s already, sort of, more cynical than many of us want to be. The world is not interesting enough for us to enjoy the sting of a real death. Instead we’ll have this decline, and smudge into the life where our lives and the lives of machines will become ever more blurred, as it is becoming. So, in Blade Runner, we get just a near future projection that shows us what Los Angeles would look like in thirty years if things just keep going on the way they do. You don’t need any apocalypse to watch Blade Runner You just need to know it is going to get more polluted, more people from more places are going to come there, and they are going to make more money, and it’s going to look like that, and then you’ve got Blade Runner. So, those near futures help to say something about how we see our future as a culture, as opposed, for example, to the culture of the 50’s. Now, in my view, other cultural artefacts like the apocalypse movies, were really ways to dodge the sticky and ugly task of facing a plausible near future. See, the easiest way to do this is to have a big apocalypse and start all over, then you don’t have to face all the nasty questions about what’s really going to happen if things just grind on. So, Blade Runner would be an example I would use there to try to remind you that our culture too has different views, different periods that code its rise, decline, and so on… and it’s not unusual. So, in the Roman case as well, toward the declining period of Rome, Stoicism became a dominant view. Now… there is a very positive thing to say about Stoicism. It has a deeply democratic side to it. Egalitarian side, better, since the word democracy has become polluted through misuse and so on. What word hasn’t, but it in particular. It has an egalitarian aspect to it. The two most famous of the Stoic philosophers: one was a king, and one was a slave. And the beauty of that was as follows: that they were brothers in suffering. Both would have to put up with outrageous… what, you know, Shakespeare, Hamlet, calls: “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. A kings’ life is full of troubles. Shakespeare again says, you know: “Uneasy sets the crown upon the head”, so the king needs to be a stoic, because he’s got troubles. And of course, the slave does too, and this view has beneath it an egalitarian notion that we are alike in a couple of respects. We are all going to have troubles, and then there is that absolutely democratic institution, that as far as I know hasn’t been abolished yet, and its death. The one absolutely democratic institution on the planet. I mean, isn’t that beautiful? In a way, rather than to be, sort of, existentialist about it – that sort of dress in black, 60’s attitude about it – I mean death is a kind of utopian concept for me because even the rulers have to face it. I mean, I actually laugh, and some of you must too, when you see the poster: “He who dies with the most toys wins”. You know, well, you go: “That’s kind of a relief, you know”. In the end, Trump just has three limousines at his funeral, well at the rate Trump is going, he may only have one. But in any case, the point is that there is a democratic institution widely respected by us and feared, even when we don’t want to think or talk about it much. And beneath it, as I will argue later, there is a greater danger. Okay, I talked about Hedonism, and I’ve talked about Stoicism. The important connection I want to make is: it seems difficult to imagine how on the ruins of the Roman Empire, Christianity could have arisen and conquered, and had its conditions conquered so quickly in the West. I mean, that really is a rather remarkable historical, you know, turn of events. That a slave religion, banned throughout the empire, would end up being adopted and then spread. Now we don’t want to be too mystical about this, because the historian Gibbon said that it spread not by the preaching of the word, but by fire and the sword. That is a way to spread certain doctrines. I read the paper this morning. You can still spread a doctrine that way. Not simply through the preaching of the word on TV, but the fire and the sword are sometimes handy. There is more than one way to convince someone, in short. I am arguing that there are preferable ways to do it. But, in any case, Stoicism helps us to understand this: during the declining part of the Roman Empire, the Stoics’ account of their social reality and of the limited chances for happiness within it… you know, this courage, Apatheia, was also backed up with an almost – and here I am going to use the Americanised version – existentialist view, that sort of “All is vanity”. So for me, a classic Stoic doctrine you can all go back and read during break – it’s not an assignment – it’s in every motel. It’s the Gideon bible. Open your Gideon bible, find the book of Ecclesiastes, and read Ecclesiastes. It is a magnificent Stoic doctrine because it says “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”. Pretty big statement. ALL. The guy goes: “Look, I had money, but that was vanity. I gave myself to know knowledge, that was vanity. All is vanity”. Well that interesting old text helps to explain why the Stoics were ready to hear, finally, the message of the Christians, which about the world, was the same. In other words, Saint Augustine’s account of this world, and the Stoics’ account are the same. Augustine calls this world “the region of unlikeness”. Everything is garbled up, messy, based on a text of Saint Paul’s, you know… “We see through a glass darkly”, you know. And so, I want you to see that Stoicism, as it were, prepared really fertile ground for the preaching of the word of the early Christians. And the reason it did seems to me simple: because the Stoics had a problem but not a good answer. Namely, they had a good account of the problem, and then along come these weirdos who you have been previously hunting down and killing, and they go: “Wait a minute, now listen to us again. We know when you had all your power, this didn’t sound so smart, now you might want to listen”. And then the answer comes: “But there is good news. Although there is a world like this one, there is another one…”. When we discuss Freud, we will understand why humans sometimes make such projections. While this world isn’t working out, there’s another one, and while justice won’t be rewarded here, it will be rewarded there. While happiness isn’t possible here, the right kind of life will give it to you there. So if you read Ecclesiastes all the way to the end, the reason Ecclesiastes is not finally a Stoic doctrine, is because the preacher has the hope in his heart that the messiah will come, and there will be an answer to these problems. But, with the Stoics, they both agree about the world that we are all in now – the mundane world that we are in now – that it’s “a bad show”, not working. So, that is the way in which these movements – and that’s a very brief account, but – that’s the way in which these three answers to human conduct arose in succession, sort of. Not rapid succession, these were massively long historical movements, many variants. And when I say movements, you’ve got to remember that as long as I am discussing Greek society, Roman society, and Medieval society, you have to point out that if you talk about movements among people who think, you are only talking about a very limited number of folks. Not in terms of them thinking, but in terms of us having any record of it. For all I know, they thought more and better about all of this. But, it seems to me that Marx has a banal truth down, and I know today it’s not popular to say that Marx got anything right. But one thing, certainly I think Marx got right was that as far as the history of ideas go, the ruling ideas in each epoch are basically the ideas of the ruling classes. The dominant ones. Not all the ideas, but the dominant ideas of each historical period will be the ideas discussed by the dominant classes. The reason that’s not a surprising thesis is that the women are out having babies this fast, and that’s almost biologically required, as well as required by patriarchy for a society to continue. It’s required by both. Doesn’t justify it, its… barbaric. And then slaves are doing necessary labour, without which you do not have the leisure to pursue philosophy. It’s important to remember this is a leisure activity. Without leisure time, you can’t pursue it. It may be why we don’t have a very philosophical culture now. It’s because we work longer and harder now than we did forty years ago. I think that’s right statistically, although there must be a sociologist somewhere in the crowd. But, it’s right according to the advertisements I have been seeing on TV that, as it were, brag about it: “We now work 65 hours a week”, and I went: “Oh, joy! That’s a real thrill. Glad it’s going up, hope you guys can get it back up to where it was when Dickens wrote. Congratulations”. I am sorry, I am off on a squee. Now I’ll have to come back to the point. I just… my mind wanders, I don’t know… watching too many Robin Williams skits [crowd laughter]. Anyway. Ah, these three forms of human conduct. The last, and that is that the slow ascendency of Christianity. Spread by both the preaching of the word, and fire and the sword. Based on a mystery, wrapped in an enigma and a very confusing one at that. We will discuss that later. Not on the first day. You don’t do the God stuff on the first day. We’ll do it in a more modern context, when I think I’ll throw in a few remarks about Kierkegaard. He’s a philosopher who gives a stunning attempt to defend Christianity in an era in which he says “Because all are Christians, ipso facto, none are”. Which I think is a quite elegant and correct argument. Structurally it is. Very interesting, but we will discuss that later. It’s a snotty thing to say, but it’s worth saying. So, the Christian era. And here is a vast wealth of views about the best kind of life for human beings in the Medieval period. Modernist scholars, scholars who will concentrate on the figures that I will after the break: Kant, Mill, and others vastly underestimate both the diversity of knowledge in the medieval period and what it discovered in the sciences and so on. Now, we are right that it was “The Dark Ages” in terms of the political dimensions I have been mentioning. But then, we hardly have room to throw stones in that regard today either. So “The Dark Ages”… is overkill. In the Medieval period there are a lot of views, but it is fair to say, along with the sociologist Max Weber, that the Middle Ages were somehow “enchanted”. Now, by that he meant that at the centre of the ideologies in the West… remember as we do philosophy, it’s a Western discourse, okay. It doesn’t mean that no other people in the world are good enough to do it. It means that’s the way we have understood it here, and certainly it doesn’t mean that our way of doing it and understanding it is at all right. I’ll come around to that, but only at the last lecture when we go back over this train of doing Western philosophy. But in the West it’s important to remember that this period was much more variegated than the simple “Dark Ages” account. The Medievals though did live in a world kind of enchanted by an overarching belief system which can be seen not just in their religious texts – in other words, not just in philosophy – although there it is beautifully expressed by Aquinas – better expressed by Augustine, one of my favourite writers – but by Aquinas, and then towards the Late Medieval period, Duns Scotus and others. Saint Bonaventure and many other great writers. And some of them who disagree quite wildly on many things. And that period produces one of the most elegant arguments in the whole philosophical tradition, and that’s Saint Anselm’s Ontological Argument for the existence of God, which is the closest thing we have in philosophy to a knockdown argument. It argues that God has got to exist, and if I have time I’ll run through it briefly here in a second. But anyway I am trying, as I say, to draw this 2000 year period to a close in modernity, because while this period is enchanted around a set of beliefs at which Christian… various Christian views are at the centre, and in which society is, again, sort of hierarchically arranged with differential relations to God, and yet each one of those mediated relations confers meaning. In other words meaning not in some small sense like: “Well, my life has meaning. I have got a good job and a lot of friends”. No, meaning in the sense that you are an actor in a cosmic drama, in which your decision to… to sin, or not to sin, to be saved or not to be saved was crucially important in a big cosmic drama. Which while your everyday life might be really bad… you know, “cave laborem” was no fun. While that may not have been so hot, there was a way that your life had some structure of meaning. Also, in this period of Western Civ… – and I think this is clearly right – because all things were seen to be created, right. Then even the very rocks and stones, and you know, Saint Francis and all this: the birds, the rocks, the trees, the stones, all were signs of God. Now, that view of Christianity continues on at least until Melville. Why do you think he is so mad at Moby Dick? You know… the good old Norman New Englander goes well: “I don’t understand” – the Starbuck goes to Captain Ahab – “Why are you so mad at a poor dumb fish that did but strike thee out of blind instinct”. And Ahab just said: “You’re crazy, all things are guided by…” – you know, of course he doesn’t say the word “God”, that would have been a little over the edge – “…by some inscrutable power that has hounded and dogged us since first we walked upon this earth”. It is the thing behind the fish I cheaply hate, which is of course explains why Melville thought he had written a very nasty book. He had, for that period. In any case, the world of Melville that he evokes there – and in the medieval period which I don’t think in some practical ways is at all over by then, and in some ways still isn’t over – was an enchanted world. By enchanted, I don’t want you to get the happy idea, that Walt Disney notion of it. But it does contrast with what Max Weber will talk about when I discuss these modern philosophers, and that’s a disenchanted world. And my easiest and quickest way to give you Max Weber on this is to suggest two things. One, a disenchanted world is one in which there is a place for everything, and everything is in its place, where quantitative relations (numerical ones) were more important than qualitative, by and large. Where rules and procedures are followed, period. That’s procedural rationality for Weber. [It] characterises bureaucracies and economies. Rules are followed. Period. It’s a principle of them. But without giving you a lot of Max Weber, I can simply refer you to a better critic of bureaucracy, Franz Kafka. So, if you want to read “Before the Law”, or “The Trial”, you get a better sense for just exactly how disenchanted modern institutions can appear. I mean, it is true that the justice of the medieval period was arbitrary, but while it was arbitrary, there was something human about it. In other words, it could take account of differences. Under procedural justice… if you have ever been in traffic court, you know how that works, right? “Driving drunk – one year in jail, one hundred dollar fine, probation, one year in jail, hundred dollar fine, probation…” Nobody cares why you were drunk, it doesn’t matter if Uncle Henry died, it doesn’t matter, because there is a procedure and they follow it. That’s a disenchanted world, one in which the rules are there. Now, in not all respects do I mean to that that is worse than an enchanted one. Not at all. I just mean, that from our perspective now, we don’t want to call that – “Modern life” – that’s so hot, and this other stuff the Dark Ages. It’s not that simple. It’s not that simple. Okay, so if one wanted a, sort of, moniker for the whole Medieval period, in one way or another the imitation of a life like Christs guides that period to the extent that it’s possible for whoever can do it, and to the extent that various groups start demanding a role in that life; because struggle plays a role in each one of these social formations that I’ll have to wait until I discuss Marx to get around to… but I am willing to wait. Okay, I guess that now, since this is a philosophy course, I’ll give you a philosophical argument since I have just been doing a talk about human values and laying out three positions. I hope I have out there at least one Hedonist, one Stoic, you know… you can still be these things. I mean, as far as I know, you can go down to the mall and get little books on them, and it even tells you what to wear, and some of the things to say [crowd laughter]. Let me give you Anselm’s magnificent argument in the medieval period for the existence of God. I don’t have it written down here, I’ll have to reconstruct it from memory. Now, you won’t understand Anselm’s argument… Let me warn you in advance that many philosophers consider it a trick. But to understand Anselm’s argument, you have to see that it’s an argument between only two interlocutors: the fool who has said in his heart that there is no God, and the believer. If you are neither, this argument won’t have any impact on you. In other words, if you are a person who is not either someone who said there is no God or there is [a God] then you are really not a party to this dispute. So in a certain sense I am not, and it gives me kind of the freedom to throw the argument out quickly to you and let you consider it. But I do think that it’s important to point out that as weird as it sounds today to believe in God and to do it seriously – it sounds weird to me too, I am not up here preaching, I don’t… – I am not even suggesting this, it sounds absolutely weird. In the history of philosophical discourse, this argument I am about to give is the one that’s most nearly proved. It’s a very powerful argument, so… It holds between interlocutors, one of which doesn’t believe and the other does. And the argument goes something like this. It starts with a magnificent definition that is not an attempt to tell us all about what God is, but about how we understand God, and that definition is as follows: “God is a being greater than which cannot be conceived, period”. God is a being greater than which cannot be conceived, period. Now, once you have bought that, you may see where the argument is headed… The second premise is this one: “It is greater to exist in the mind and in reality than in the mind alone”. Now, let me say a bit about those two premises, then I’ll quickly give you the conclusion. The first one seems to be a simple definition about how we use the word “God”. Namely, when we in the West say “God”, we mean “A being, a bigger one than which you ain’t got”. So, it’s silly to us to go “Well, my God is going to whip yours, cause ours is just the biggest there is”, so He is a being greater than which we can’t conceive. The second premise, however, looks like a trick, but it isn’t. It’s directed at the non-believer. Because clearly the dispute between the two is this: the non-believer also must accept the premise that “It’s greater to exist in the mind and in reality than in the mind alone”, because what the non-believer is trying to argue is that God does not exist in reality. So, if he didn’t believe that, or she didn’t believe it, there wouldn’t be a non-believer. They wouldn’t care about the dispute. So, here Anselm has given two premises that seem to be absolutely acceptable to both interlocutors. But from just those two premises, it follows that God must exist. Must exist. In Reality. Because if he did not, we could conceive of greater. Now, if you think that is a trick, I’ll just do it again [crowd laughter]. This is where we do philosophy like: “Can he pull a rabbit out of a hat?”. I’ll do it again. Since it’s greater, you know, to exist in the mind and in reality than in the mind alone, and we are conceiving God… if we conceive a non-existent God, that ain’t him. Because we could conceive of greater: one just like that one, plus one that really exists. Follow me? So when you use the word, you are committed to belief in God’s real existence. Anselm’s argument is elegant. In a dispute between believer and non-believer, only on pain of absolute contradiction can you get out Anselm’s argument, it’s a bind. Because God being a being greater than which cannot be conceived, if you buy the premise that it’s greater to exist in reality and in the mind than in the mind alone, it follows that God exists in reality and in the mind. So that’s Anselm’s Ontological argument. I won’t pursue what has been pursued for, oh, a thousand years and more since, and that’s the whole series of objections to this argument. I would simply say that in terms of an elegant conceptual argument, it is perhaps one of the greatest in philosophy, and goes to show as Nietzsche once said that: “Aren’t the strangest of things the most nearly proved?”. It looks like a trick, doesn’t it. The argument kind of looks like a trick. I see [some you reacting as though]: “That’s kind of tricky”. Maybe it is, but if it is, it’s a good trick.
Kant and the Path to Enlightenment (1990)
Transcript: I have the daunting task of summarising 2000 years in two sentences, so I’ll avoid it, and hope that you saw the last tape. Which was basically… the movement so far is to present something like a traditional history of ideas but – if you’ve noticed – with little rejoinders along the way that suggest that that history of ideas is not innocent. Not as though it were being presented in the way that the National Association of Scholars would have you believe. Books being selected as though by very intelligent readers because they are the best books. That isn’t always wrong, but the story of the survival of books and the formations of canons clearly has other factors. It couldn’t be accidental that the books we have discussed so far, and the movements are white, male, viewed basically through the European axis, and will continue to be so. And that those books got canonised cannot be a total accident. In other words, it just couldn’t be prima facie, totally accidental that that occurred. So that would give you reason to suspect that there are other factors. See, it’s not the argument that there are no factors of merit in the formation of a canon, or a group of books called philosophy books or history books, but that the only factor can’t be merit. There must be other factors. Material factors. Factors of groups that are oppressed and so on, and those I’ll get to later. But… so I am not going to rehash the rather quick run-through of that 2000 year period. Instead I am going to jump right into what… I have already mentioned this man’s name before [Marx], I’ll mention it again [and] I’ll jump right into modernity. Now, modernity is a word that is thrown around a lot and in many contexts now in discussions of art, in discussions of politics, and all over the place, sociology. In fact Sociology was born from a distinction – modern sociology – from a distinction between modern and traditional societies. Now, that is not a left wing distinction that only Marx had. You know, Marx wasn’t the only one that noticed that, as it were, capitalism was different than feudalism. So did Tonnies, so did Max Weber, and so did everyone else. So did Charlie Chaplin. In Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin knows that something has happened, right. New kind of movements, the machines. I mean this not a particularly… So what we are going to do now is to move into a new kind of world, in which the problems of everyday life from which philosophical problems arise and which they try to address in a certain way [ideology]. Now that way is not simply as a compensation, although I have presented that as one aspect of it. They also may be a way to evade the problems. That’s the sense in which Marx uses the word ideology. You know, to evade, cover up or legitimate some illegitimate feature of the problems in everyday life, and sometimes theories may even help respond to them. You may think here of Dewey on progressive education. In any case, the ethical views we are going to discuss now belong to modernity, to that modern project that is historically and symbolically understood to begin somewhere around the French Revolution. Understood by Marx as the victory of a class. A class of basically Merchants over a class of Aristocrats. With the help of a massive number of workers who see more to gain under the Merchants than under the Aristocrats. So that’s a brief story, but I still think a very plausible one, you know. At least in the absence of better stories, we stick with the best ones we have. So if you combine Max Weber’s understanding of modernity, which has to do with bureaucracy, the State and the increasing rationalisation of modern life. The areas subject to rational, procedural rules – that’s one half of the story – and then the increasing commodification, or the extent to which the economy plays a role in shaping everyday life. Those two halves of the story together, as it were – for me – form the break into modernity, from earlier societies. These ethical theories we will discuss now are very different than the other ones. I could present other ethical views, like the Greek view of Excellence, the Roman view of Hedonistic pleasure, the Christian view of imitating the life of Christ; to be a Christian, a Knight of Faith, and so on. Those were character based views about how to live in a society. But with the advent of modernity, a new problem arises. And that’s that human subjects for the first time get to be fragmented, as it were, into individual atoms. Now it’s very important to understand that this concept of the individual is a historical one. That what we understand as our isolated little psyche – that little private spot in our head – and the little wall of our body as being us is not a datum factum, but something that is theoretically constructed and developed historically from other and differing views. In fact, on the planet today there are differing views about it. Now this new individual, according to Max Weber, would have a task that his feudal predecessor couldn’t have had. At least under feudalism, no matter how lowly the serf, his life meant something in this grander drama. The battle between God and the devil. One that we can still enjoy vicariously, by watching The Exorcist, right? You go: “Oh, I remember that… Exorcist… yeah, power of Christ…” and you know, go “Yeah, it’s great”, you know. You kind of vicariously enjoy the past. It’s one of the features of this society we live in. In any case, the important point here is that the new theories will not respond, as it were, to character. Because what they will respond to are individual – individuated – actions. Single actions. One way this distinction is made in philosophy is that previous ethical theories were virtue ethics. That meant about the formation of good folks in good societies. Under bourgeois views of ethics, like Kant’s, Mill’s and others, it won’t be. Ethics won’t be about the formation of good folks in good societies. It will be a rather narrow enquiry into whether action A, B or C is the correct one to perform. In other words, like everything else, ethics will become more instrumental and more quantitative. So if these views sound to you clearer than the, sort of, the ways of life that I have presented rather broadly, they are clearer and more quantitative, but for very deep historical reasons. Because they are trying to make up for a deficit that’s based on individuals now being fragmented and separated in a society where social bonds are not as fundamental as procedural, legal relations in the State, or as important as economic relations which become – for the first time – a structuring principle of society. And that’s not meant to be a negative remark, I mean if you think so, wait until I talk about Marx. I mean, I think Marx had a lot more good things to say about capitalism than Bill Buckley. And in the Manifesto, if you read it, it’s the greatest system ever. Unfortunately, it’s the worst too. Well, we live in it, so we experience some of both. I mean, that’s not that bad an account. Anyway, that’s all the background I want to do, because now we are moving from Virtue ethics to a kind of ethics that’s supposed to answer for us individual subjects, who no longer have the background of meanings to draw on, for right action. In other words, in the feudal period, a right action is one recommended by mum and dad, as well brought up by the Church, and so on. So, the key word for traditional society would be “authority”, you know. And it would be important to understand that – while the French Revolution was a revolution – is that the authority that can be recognised in a post revolutionary France: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, bloody revolution… the only authority to be recognised after this historical break, in principle, will be the authority of the autonomous individual. Kant says in a famous essay called “What is Enlightenment?”, he goes: “The motto of the enlightenment is: ‘Dare to use your own reason'”. All decisions henceforth, if you make them because somebody else told you – mum, dad, the king, the prince, or even the government, or even God himself – for Kant are heteronomous. All decisions henceforth must be autonomous. You’ve got to say it’s what you want to do. A key and important advance – I am not presenting this negatively – an important advance and a key moment in modernity. Autonomy becomes central to ethical decisions, I’ll get onto that in just a moment. But it’s a broader point, because it’s a point about the kind of human subjects that are being constructed by that new order. You know, we have got another one coming. That new order is now quite old. Okay, personally I hope I don’t bore you with this. I find Kant’s ethical theory exciting, and I am going to try to make it exciting. Because to this day it is probably the highest achievement of this society. And you can call it bourgeois, you can call it whatever you want to – using Max Weber’s terms – that, for now, is not the argument. It’s a new kind of society, is enough for now. And Kant’s argument is about how individuals in this society should judge their actions in terms of right and wrong. Kantian ethics begins with the presupposition. And now that’s not surprising in philosophy, because after all, as Hegel said: “One must begin”, and any beginning must presuppose something. So, he presupposes something. And what Kant presupposes in his ethics is that there is a moral law. He says that well, you know, some things are moral. There’s a moral law. There are some things that are right and wrong. That isn’t questioned by Kant. Later philosophers, I will argue, do question it. Kant just goes: “Yes, some things are moral”. Now, that belief for Kant as a human being was based on being raised by a couple of really good piteous parents. And it was just unthinkable to him that in their whole lives they had never once obeyed a moral law. And in the empirical world, if a moral law had been obeyed even once, then Kant’s style of arguing would allow him to argue based on that presupposition: “How is it possible that there be a moral law?”. That is a standard form of Kantian questioning. It’s to look at a practice and then to ask about that practice: “What are the conditions for the possibility of it?”. That is the first meaning of “critique”, a dangerous new form of thought that enters the world with the bourgeois era – critique, criticism – in a new and radical way. In any case, there is a moral law for Kant. How is it possible? Now, Kant is going to run through a circular argument, which will hit… And I admit, by the way, that it’s circular. The question is: “Is it a good circle?”. In other words, an interesting, enlightening one about our moral lives, or a boring one. And I am going to try to make it interesting because I in part agree with it. Kant begins with a series of identifications, the attempt being to not only answer: “How is the moral law possible?”, but to try to do something that looks impossible as the argument goes along. And that is to give the pure, abstract form of a moral law. A procedural one that will allow us to ask of any specific moral law: “Is it really moral?”. And we’ll see when we get to that moment. I’ll have to have a drum roll, because it’s one of the most famous philosophical arguments. But I have got to get there, so let me get there. Kant begins his argument by talking about the Will. Kant says that there is only one thing in this world or out of it that is good without qualification, and that’s a good Will. The point Kant wants to make here is that all these other things humans valued: happiness, courage, apatheia, excellence. They are good, but only with qualification. For example, if it makes you happy to murder innocent babies, well the happy part is good, but you have got to qualify it, right. You don’t want to say “Well, it’s just good, period”. You’ve got to add a qualification. And if you say: “Well, that person is an excellent chainsaw murderer”, that’s good that he’s excellent, but you’ve got to qualify it. So Kant points out that no, a good will is good, and you don’t need to qualify it. It’s just good. That’s the first step in what I am going to admit is a circular argument. Why? Because now Kant has to characterise what a good Will is. It’s not very informative to say, you know, “What is the good?” and he goes “A good will”. You know, and “What’s a good Will?”, and he tells you what that is. A good Will is one – and this is going to sound really anal, sorry. It’s Kant, I mean, you know – a good will acts for the sake of duty alone. In other words, a good will does the right thing for this reason: that it is the right thing, and no other. Not for the sake of gain, or happiness, or inclination, but because it is your due. It’s the right thing to do. So there you answer Spike Lee’s question “Do the right thing” by: you just do it because it’s the right thing, and for no other reason. This makes his view very different than some others we will discuss. In fact, Kant goes so far at one time as to suggest… and by the way, the book I am referring to here is “The Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals”, which is a very short little, very readable book. It’s not exactly a coffee table edition, but it’s a very important text. Kant at one time goes so far as to suggest that if you get a kick out of doing good – if you are sort of inclined to it – it doesn’t count [crowd laughter]. You know what I mean? You know, and we have a kind of an intuition that agrees with that. You know, in the word “do-gooder”. If you just do good because you’re a do-gooder, it doesn’t really count. Goodness, for Kant, comes out of a struggle where we… I mean, it’s sort of a more Christian notion of goodness. “We really want to sin…”, because everybody who is honest with themselves is nostalgic for Christianity because we lost the most fun part of it: sin, magnificent sin. You know, Mephistopheles: “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven”. You know, sin, boy, if we could just get that back we’d be somewhere. Sin. Well, anyway… To act because you want to – because you have a desire to do good and then you do it – for Kant is nice. But it is morally… it’s indifferent. It’s like flossing your teeth. It’s a good thing to do. But no badges, no medals, very little praise and honour for it. In a moral sense. No, morality comes out of that struggle like: “I want to sin…”, and then no, you do the right thing. “I really want to kill the S.B.”… You don’t, you do the right thing. So Kant sees morality in that kind of struggle between our duty, which our reason… because reason is the big word of the enlightenment, you know that, right? Reason as opposed to superstition. That’s what the Enlightenment, Modernity and the Capitalists were selling against the King and the Church: reason. And I mean, I don’t think that’s a bad idea. So Kant sees this struggle between reason and our passions, when we went out and do what is, you know, “right” procedurally, according to our reason then that’s doing the right thing for its own sake, and that’s where we give moral praise. However, you may have noticed that so far we have another circular account. Even if it turns out that the good Will acts for the sake of duty alone, we still don’t know what the good Will is, because now any intelligent inquirer into how they ought to act would go: “Well, what’s my duty?”. I mean, just doing my duty no matter what, which of course – given that Kant is a German philosopher – conjures up problems. We know that there are problems with just doing your duty no matter what. And by the way, so did Kant. His emphasis on duty understands that you don’t do your duty no matter what, you have to characterise what form it should take, so he does. Duty – and now look at the circle here – duty is when one acts out of reverence for the moral law. No chuckles out there, but there should be, because now we are right back where we started, see. Started out with moral law and now we are back to it. Well, this is where the argument would stop, and it would be a terrible argument, and would make Kant a very uninteresting moral philosopher except that now Kant begins the impossible task of giving us a single, formalisable moral law. Very important to understand that it’s – for him – it must be formalisable. A real formula, usable to judge actions by. Remember, this is the Bourgeoisie era – this era of the bourgeois – they won’t just take these fudgey “excellent” kind of criteria. They really want to know if you are doing good. You know, your boss says “Did you have a good day?”, sometimes he wants a real definite answer. Well, here’s where the drum roll should come in, because Kant’s Categorical Imperative is a magnificent achievement of the philosophical imagination. In the categorical imperative Kant tries to give a single moral rule. General enough to cover all the Ten Commandments, and the golden rule, and all other decent rules, and to exclude all of them that won’t fit those kind of patterns. And he succeeds to an extent what I would have thought impossible. And I will quickly tell you what the Categorical Imperative is. Now, he gives six or seven versions of it. To shorten the day, I have selected one. The categorical imperative runs something like this. And so all you have got to do is write this down and always do it, and you’ll be good. Congratulations. I don’t think it’s that easy, but anyway. The Categorical Imperative is “Always act so that you can will the rule of your action to be a universal law”. Always act so that you can will – so that you can will – the rule of your action to be a universal law. It is an imperative because it is a command. Categorical Imperative. It is an imperative, because it’s a command. You remember Moses didn’t come down – you know, Chuck Heston, right – he didn’t come down with the Ten Suggestions [crowd laughter]. So, like Kant goes: “Moral rules are commands, not suggestions!”, so that’s the imperative part. Categorical, because not hypothetical. You see, we have got to cover a moral theory later that says “You should do action X, if something else”, which is a hypothetical. For Kant, it isn’t like that. It’s you should do action X, period. Categorical sentence. Commands, as I say… Well, it’s the strong sense of morality that lots of, sort of, you know, the older Americans [would identify with]… the strong sense of morality. Okay, what does it mean to always act so that you can will the rule of your action to be a universal law? Well, it means that for every action you perform, you could conceivably write a rule. You know, you’re tired, and you agreed to go out with someone, but you’re tired, and now you don’t want to do it. So you lie to them. Now, you could write a rule about that, and it says: “It’s okay to lie to people when you are tired, and don’t feel like keeping a promise”. Well, could you? Under the rule I just read you, could you write such a moral rule consistently? No. Here’s why not. Because, you would have to one, be willing to rule that as a universal law. Which means that all humans begin to behave that way. Which would mean there would be no more promises, binding obligations of any kind would disappear. And then whatever you might think about that situation, some might like it, even me, it might be Anarchy, who knows. But for sure, the institutions upon which the very rule is based would disappear. For Kant, that’s a sign you have broken it. The second sign you have broken the Categorical Imperative is that it must be reversible. By that – and this is as old as the Golden Rule. In fact, all it is a formal explanation of the Golden Rule. You have to be willing to say: “Would I want anyone to do that to me?” and answer “Yes”. So, here are the criteria it has to meet. It has to be one, universalisable without restriction, and it has to be reversible. Now, other than that there is no content to the Categorical Imperative. That is its content: universal, and reversibility. Now, there are two other important points to make about it quickly. No proper names ever go in moral rules. Now, I need to remind George Bush of this. No proper names ever go in moral praise and blame, ever. Because these imperatives hold for all or none. So, no group names go in there, there are no moral rules that go: “Thou shalt tell the truth, except for African-Americans who we know are liars”, or, “Thou shalt be honest, except for Arabians”, or something. No! Moral rules are not like that. Gotta be good for everyone, or they are no good for anyone. They are not even moral if they are not universalisable. And they are also not moral if you can pick out unique exceptions to which they for some unusual reason don’t apply. They have got to apply universally. This is Kant’s theory anyway. Now, what’s more interesting than this so far, are the principles that Kant draws from the Categorical Imperative. And some of which have remained extremely important to us today – and one is still important to me now – I think at least one of them. He draws from this Categorical Imperative four principles. The first one, is one that if it were followed, as a moral rule, would make the capitalist economy impossible, at least in its current form. It would also make the state socialist economies that just fell impossible, which they already are under their present form. Anyway, it’s the “Ends Principle”. The Ends Principle – Kant says – follows from the Categorical Imperative and the Ends Principle is as follows: “Always treat others, and yourself as though you were an end, and never a mere means”. You need to think about that one for a while. Always treat other people as an end, and never as a mere means. Now, my West Texas boys way of saying that is “Don’t use folks”. Don’t use them. That means, don’t hire them at Burger King so you can make extra money as an Assistant Manager, so you can… because you are using them. That’s what I meant about it would make official economy impossible, to follow that moral rule. You can’t use folks. Don’t use them. Because the Ends Principle tells you that you treat your own life as an end. In other words, you don’t treat yourself as a means generally speaking, you treat your activities as ends. I mean, well, “This is me, I am doing it”, it’s an end. But when you treat someone instrumentally, it’s not what happens. Frequently… and this comes up at Duke University and it probably comes up in dating out in the more adult world of multiples, singles, polymorphousness, and all, you know, all the new talk shows, Oprah and whatever. Dating is frequently not a relation that obeys the Principle of Ends. Frequently the situation is one in which somebody is supposed to use someone else as a means to an end. Well, it’s wrong, according to Kant because you should never treat any person – including yourself, by the way – as a mere means, but only as an end. That’s the Ends Principle. Connected to that, and connected to the imperative is one that I think is worth fighting over. I said I deeply believe in some principles. This is one I deeply believe in: The Principle of Freedom. Which is we must always act under the practical postulate that our will is free. Now, here is what Kant is saying, and I think it’s worth remembering. That we all have these arguments that we can’t do anything about something, and that so much stuff is going on, how can I help? For Kant, none of that works. It’s all excuses. Later, Sartre will call it “Bad Faith”. The practical postulate under which you should morally act is that you are free. Now, why does Kant call it a practical postulate? It’s simple. Because you can’t show that you are free, you may not even be free, in other words you could even be in prison – as Sartre says – or you could be determined by psychological, social factors, whatever. But you should act under the practical postulate that your moral decision makes a difference. Now – if you have noticed – so far all Kant is doing is giving us an account of what a lot of folks think moral action is anyway. Sort of, maybe this one is controversial, but we’ll see. In any case, that practical postulate is one that you have all adopted today, whether you knew it or not. Because hardly anyone gets up in the morning and dresses themselves as a cleverly constructed automaton, and says: “I wish I could freely do something today, but since there was the Big Bang and I know the laws of physics and biology and behavioural science, that means I am going to go through the day like an automaton. No. Practically speaking, you got up and went: “Hell, I am going to go to the talks”, right? As though you were free to do it. And, you’re here! Great. But, it’s funny when we turn to politics we forget this. We go “Well, you know, there is just nothing I can do…”. Well, Sartre called that Bad Faith because… in other respects you act under a practical postulate. Act as though you are free. You might get lucky. You might be free, who knows! Act that way. It’s worth trying! I mean, it’s better than being a slave to try that [acting free]. Well, anyway this is not some lefty idea. This is the greatest bourgeois ethicist. I mean this is your own revolution, folks, you know. Now, connected to the principle of freedom is one I am equally attached to. The principle of autonomy. Always act so that you can regard your own will as making universal law. Now this is more responsibility than most people want. This means that when you decide, you ask your question… you ask this question. You decide autonomously. That means not under the will of another. In here [bangs chest]. Autonomously in your heart, and in your mind. And autonomy is a beautiful word. You act autonomously. Now, what does it mean. What does it mean to regard your own will here as making universal law? It means this. That you would be willing for everyone else to act just as you did. So that if you make a perfect ass of yourself, and you do it autonomously, you are at least willing that everybody else do it – and you may be! See, that’s not inconsistent with autonomy. On the other hand, autonomy is a frightening principle. Because even Kant says if God himself were to come down and to give you a moral directive, if you followed it, that would be non- moral. It wouldn’t be wrong, but it wouldn’t morally count. If God said: “Go over there”, and you did it, it would be okay, but it wouldn’t be moral. Moral stuff comes from you. The decisions you make. Not from the decisions others make for you. So if you are a patriot because everybody else is, even if you decided to agree with them, it ain’t worth diddly. Not morally. It has to come from you. For me, that is a powerful principle, it’s the Principle of Autonomy. Now Kant, sort of, caps this off now by returning in a strange way to our earlier questions about what human beings are like. And then one last point and then I am through with Kant. I hope I am on time. Yeah, okay… Kant says that the human capacity to be a moral agent, just that capacity that we have to ever act morally… and remember this is not some loony argument. Kant is procedurally describing what moral behaviour would look like, while just holding to one side the question of whether very many people ever actually act this way. He’s just saying if there is moral action, it has got to look like this. It can’t be some smidgey thing about “Well, I am nice…”. It can’t be that. That’s his argument anyway. The human capacity to be a moral agent in this strong sense gives each human what Kant calls – and what I think is worthy of calling – “dignity”. And dignity for Kant means an unconditional worth. Human dignity means that each one of these newly constructed bourgeois individuals has unconditional worth. Which, as an insight – I think – many of us share. You hear of a settlement of a wrongful death suit. And all of us can feel the pain of the judge trying to put a dollar amount on it. Why? Because we know from this Kantian insight – and our own autonomous insight – that a human life doesn’t have that kind of value. It’s not a quantitative value. Because that human being could be a moral agent, the value of that life is unconditional. Which means that it’s not a monetary one. It has an unconditional value. Now, the sort of, last part of Kant and then we are through with him for a while. The last part is where he ties all this up… All this so far is about how individuals act – and what they are – if there’s morals. If there is a moral law. But, if each one of us acted this way in regard to each other one of us, we would be in a state that Kant calls “The Kingdom of Ends”. A kingdom of ends would be a place where all of us in our mutual relations with one another treated each other as ends and not as mere means. Where each one of us granted the other his (or her) autonomy, and we are similarly granted our autonomy. In which each one of us decided autonomously on our freedom and is granted the same right by each and every other one. A kingdom like that, for Kant, would be one in which no-one – again to make it simple and “West Texas” – in which no-one uses anybody. Nobody gets used. And that’s how Kant wraps up what I consider a fascinating and one of the most important moral accounts of this period of philosophy. It’s that the last goal is to reach a situation where we could live in a kingdom of ends. By the way he says that it would be one of perpetual peace. That of course, as we know, we are still waiting on because there’s another new order coming. Okay, I am not going to have time to do as much as I wanted to do, because I did more with Kant than I intended to do. Let me contrast Kant’s morality, which today goes under the name of “Deontology“, namely morality that, you know, is about these fundamental rules – rule governed morality – versus a morality that all of you will be familiar with, so it will require a very short explanation. It’s Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill’s moral principle, and I am going to give you Mill’s version of it, and it’s called Utilitarianism. And Americans ought to know all about this, it’s in Star Trek movies, it’s all over the place. And so, I’ll give you the utilitarian principle, and I can do it quickly, because it is based on Hedonism. But it is not based on individual hedonism, but on social hedonism. Now, I’ll try to explain that. You’ll understand it once I read the principle, and you already know it, I think. We should always act so as to bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number. Now there is one rule on the one side, on the other the categorical imperative says that we should always act so that the rule of our action could be willed by us to be universal, and on the other side, the principle that we should always act to bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number. For Mill and Bentham, it’s clear that happiness is the greatest good. It’s clear. And they give a kind of empirical argument for it – even though that’s not elegant philosophically – they say: “We know happiness is good because that’s what people go after, so, it’s good”. It’s kind of simple minded, but that’s what led Nietzsche to say that Mill was a blockhead, I mean… but anyway [crowd laughter]. In fact, Nietzsche went further. He said “Human beings don’t want happiness, only the English want that”. Okay so “the good” here is happiness. That’s why it’s sometimes referred to as “the greater happiness” principle. And calculation is no problem here. You may go: “Well, you couldn’t be utilitarian because you couldn’t calculate”. But in fact the Utilitarian response to that is flat footed and rather – you know – smart. And that’s that you do it all the time. Every time you buy a car, every time you risk driving anywhere, you calculate. “Easier to get to the airport by car, or easier to get Ma to drive me? Easier to go here to do that… better to go to Yale than to Harvard?…”, and so on. So, you may say that in objection to this theory that you can’t do it, but you do it all the time. You make utilitarian calculations. In fact, these two moral theories – in terms of just pure moral theories – still dominate all standard philosophical discussion. Now, it’s clear to me that one of them is more interesting than the other. I think you know which one is more interesting to me. [crowd laughter]. But I have got to warn you that there are knock-down objections to both, and by knock-down objections, I mean knock-down objections. We know that these theories are wrong because there are knock- down objections to them. The best way to look at both of them however might be as models of moral action. If by models we don’t mean the shopping mart idea of something we do once in a while, but as a way to think about a moral life, if you are interested in it. Some people aren’t interested in it, but if you are, it’s a way to think about it. But the objections are important to see. The classic objection to Kant’s Categorical Imperative is that it is empty of content, period, because it depends on what someone is willing to will. So, if you asked Charlie Manson: “Charlie…” – you know who Charlie Manson is? – “Charlie, are you willing to will your actions to be universal?” What gives us a good reason to think Charlie Manson won’t go: “Why not, I am the meanest S.B. in the valley”. You see, at the bottom line, all Kant could say to him is “Well, you are just not a rational moral agent”, which isn’t much of an answer to Manson now is it? You see, the problem that is paid for making your moral theories universal at that level is you lose content. But now the utilitarian principle also has a deep problem that I have to mention. Very unfortunate problems with it. One of them being that it seems to violate our sense of justice. I’ll use one example here. We have a device that will allow us to execute someone on television the way Attorney General Maddox in Texas wanted to do it. To scare people. But only Maddox and one scientist know that the device actually blows the prisoner, atomises him, and sends him away to the Blessed Isles. Now, here is the other device, which is the normal Texas electric chair. Now, both of them have, by my example, the same effect on the public in terms of utility. They reduce crime, thus making for greater happiness for a greater number of people. But which one should the utilitarian prefer? The one that actually executes the prisoner or the one that blows him to the Blessed Isles, by Utilitarian principles? Yes or Nos are okay. The Blessed Isles. But that doesn’t seem fair now, does it? Why should he get to go to the Blessed Isles, just because of this blessed principle? You see: you want to say “Blessed Isles or no Blessed Isles, happiness or no unhappiness, that isn’t fair”. So, fairness is the thing that Kantian ethics seems to capture better. But Utilitarian ethics seems to capture content and real decision making frequently better than Kant’s ethics. So they both have strong points and weak points, and that’s important to remember. There is another really bad thing about Utilitarian ethics taken too seriously. By that I mean, taken as more than a model of moral reasoning. Say your kid has got an IQ of 110 and is lazy. You love him though. The neighbour’s kid has got an IQ of 140, busy, has got a Gilbert chemistry set as big as the wall, and you have got only enough money to send one kid to medical school, and you are a convinced Utilitarian. Whose kid are you going to send? Neighbour’s kid. Some people wouldn’t think that was moral though. Why? Well, because both these moral theories – it’s important to remind you now – ignores so much of our lives. Things like friends, family, special relations, ethnic relations, gender relations, class relations. Why are all these things ignored? Well because they are bourgeois moral theories. That’s why, among other things – among other reasons – that’s why they are ignored. Anyway that’s – to this day – the two primary moral theories. The Utilitarian principle – the utilitarian theory – and Kant’s. By the way, the Utilitarian theory has wide application besides philosophy. When you hear these economists on Nightline, be sure to remember that they are all working with utility based models. But the foundations underneath those models are quite shaky. I’ll give you one last moral example during the next talk, before we get onto it. I think that’s time to wrap up this one, isn’t it? I think…
Mill on Liberty (1990)
Transcript: Okay, we ended the last lecture by discussing the Utilitarian ethical theory which is that we should always act so as to bring about the greatest happiness for the greatest number, and Kant’s ethical theory that we should always act so that the rule of our action could be willed by us to be universal law, and then we raised objections to both those. Now, a further reminder is in order, and it’s very important. And it’s one of the reasons I call these “models” of moral reasoning, because I wanted to distinguish them from the real, embodied contexts in which moral conflicts come up. And one of the ways to do that is to direct an objection at Kant, and then direct one at sort of both theories, and this is one more objection for Kant then. What happens when you are trying to will a universal principle in a situation where two principles are clearly good, and yet you can’t do them both, and one has to fall. The classic case is this… In fact, it’s not a classic case. Our moral life is filled with situations where it isn’t just right or wrong, most of us know in those cases what to do. We may not do it, but we know what we ought to do. The really interesting cases in our moral life is where there are two things that look good, and we can’t do them both. So for example, and this is a very thin philosopher’s example, I’ll give you a thicker one later. So for example, someone comes to your door who looks like they may have worked for the CIA and says: “Where is your room mate?”. Now, it seems that you could act on the principle – a hallowed biblical commandment – “Thou shalt not lie”. Your room mate is in there, and you go: “Bill’s in there”. But you see a little, you know, bulge in the guy’s pocket, a national security patch, and you know that Bill used to be a drug smoking crazed person, so you don’t feel safe for Bill, and it seems that there is another principle, equally universalisable, that one should act so as to protect the innocent, and you know Bill is innocent. The other guy doesn’t know it, but you know it. There are two rules, both perfectly good Kantian rules, right? Would be willing to act by them all the time, be willing to rule them both. The problem is you can’t do both, gotta pick one. So… and this is an interesting part where Utilitarian theory is, I guess, a little better. What you fall back on in that situation looks like Utilitarianism. You go, well which one of these is going to, you know, lead to the best results? And you just blithely lie to the guy, I hope, and say “Bill ain’t here”. Well, you broke Kant’s rule, but you had to break one of them. That doesn’t seem that that helps Kant’s theory, in fact it doesn’t help it at all. It doesn’t help Utilitarian theory much either though, as I am about to point out. Because both theories fail to capture real moral conflicts as they are embodied in problematic situations. So now unfortunately, instead of referring to a movie that all of you have seen – although some of you may have seen it – I’ll refer to a book. There is actually a movie too, and a moral dilemma in the book that I think gives us a sense for this. It’s a book by John Fowles called “The Magus“. I hope some of you have read it. If you haven’t, there is also a movie with Anthony Quinn, called “The Magus” with the same moral dilemma in it, and here it is. A mayor of a small Greek village being occupied during the Second World War by the Nazis. There are some resistance fighters in town – only three of them – but they shoot three German officers on the beach. So, the German officers decide to retaliate, and they bring into the centre of the square a thousand of the women and children of the city and put them in this little encirclement. They capture the three resistance fighters, and of course symbolically put them on three posts. Very nice. They bring the mayor out, and they give him the following choice. And you would think that a moral theory might help with this. They say: “Look. If you shoot the three in front of your town’s people, then we’ll let everybody out of the pen. So there’s a good utilitarian thing you ought to do, right? Shoot them quick, because that’s three lives against a thousand, and the Utilitarian calculation is simple: shoot ’em for the greater good. Even though shooting them is wrong according to Kant, you do it because there is nothing else that you really can do: do it, it’s for the greater good. So the Utilitarian principle looks overwhelming in this case. On the other hand, you might have the insight that you couldn’t do it anyway, the Germans might shoot those three and the thousand, but you couldn’t do it. That would be the Kantian insight. Now it turns out though that in our real moral lives, things are much muddier than that, because he struggles with the decision, and decides to shoot the three guys. Safest thing to try. So he goes up and he begins to shoot them, and the Germans have pulled a small trick on him. They have unloaded the rifle, so he can’t shoot them. He’ll have to club them to death. Now, according to these very pretty moral theories that we have been discussing, should that make any difference? Haven’t we abstracted from any difference it should make? Should it make any difference? Clearly the answer is “No, it shouldn’t”. The same calculation should apply. Just… a good utilitarian… I could club him or just shoot him. It’s a little bit harder, will take longer, but you know, same calculation. So he starts to raise the club up to hit the guy in the centre who utters the word “freedom”. The Greek word for “freedom”. He drops the rifle. The Nazis kill all the thousand, and the three. That moral story I have related to you, not simply for its barbarism, but to show you that in embodied contexts it may not do a damn bit of good to know the rule. You may not be able – for embodied reasons – to club another human to death, even if it is the right thing to do. So that is to remind us that the moral life is complex. These theories are abstractions from the real communities, societies and systems of oppression under which we learn to follow moral rules. You have got to remember that to understand anything about politics or morality, right? It’s that in real situations the simple rules of either one of these views; utilitarian, Kantian may not work. They may not work because you woke up that day with a toothache. In other words, life has many contingencies, and you just may not be doing the right thing one day because your face hurts too much. It may not be as dramatic, in other words, as the example from the film. But that example is supposed to – in a very striking way – remind you that the moral life is filled with ambiguities, and that the problems you may face in making a decision of that kind have a large background. Okay, I want to stop with that, in terms of the discussion of Kant and Mill – in particular Utilitarian theories for a moment – I will return to them later, and Kantian style theories. By far, I think, the most influential of the two in our society especially when we justify public policies, are the Utilitarian principles. It’s clear to me now that our state isn’t run on Kantian principles because we treat differential groups differently, and Kant wouldn’t accept that. So then we have to have other kinds of justifications, which is that some greater good must come about, or should come about. So I will return the critique of Utilitarianism. In the meantime though, I want to return to this “freedom” thing, which I have already introduced Kant’s concept of freedom. One might call it a very absolute concept: the kingdom of ends. Now I am going to present two others to conclude today, and I’ll get around – since I like this “freedom” thing – I’ll get around to some more of that. The most famous account in the nineteenth century – there are two competing ones – and this is after Kant. Kant’s is earlier. One of these books I think is on most bookshelves, around universities for sure: John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty”. Many of you have probably read this, heard it referred to many times. I am going to briefly discuss this one, and I am going to distinguish two – what Sir Isaiah Berlin calls – two concepts of freedom. They are at odds with one another. The struggle between these two concepts of freedom go on within this country, and between countries. And these concepts of freedom are not abstractions to the extent that they are rooted in the real struggle – embodied struggle – of human subjects to gain freedom. This word itself is used as a material force in the battle, if you know what I mean. When you see these struggles, you hear this word: “freedom”. It’s part of the struggle to announce it, that it’s your aim, without necessarily filling it with content, as I’ll talk about when I finish today. Well, “On Liberty” is a famous book on freedom, and it’s a position that has been used by classical Liberals as well as people today who would call themselves Conservatives, and I’ll give you this argument very briefly, and I’ll try to give it very succinctly. “On Liberty” tries to answer the following question. Now remember, Mill is a utilitarian, okay, so there may be some tensions between him being that, which he sees as very important. But freedom, he also sees as very important. So there may be some tension in the two accounts, but we won’t worry about that for now. In “On Liberty”, John Stuart Mill wants to do one simple thing. He wants to show us where the grounds are for the government’s legitimate interference with our liberty. Mill wants to answer the question “When can the state legitimately interfere with our liberty”. You have got to understand that Mill’s question is one of legitimacy, and not of power. Please understand the difference. The State always has the power to interfere with us. Nearly always. This isn’t about that, this is about liberty. About when does it have – not the power but – the right to do so. So Mill comes up with a very radical principle, and it’s called the “Harm Principle”. The only legitimate ground… This is Mill’s Harm Principle. Actually he presents two, but again for the sake of being concise, we are going to discuss one I consider the most important. Mill’s Harm Principle is the following. The only legitimate ground for social coercion is to prevent harm to others, period. The Harm Principle. The only time the State can interfere with our liberty is to prevent us from harming others. That is a very wide standard indeed, because today that would shut down huge sections of it, wouldn’t it? But it is in a way a very reasonable principle, and I want to argue for it briefly. Harm here – and this is important to understand the principle – means genuine harm. It does not mean offence. The State doesn’t have the right – according to Mill – to interfere with our liberty for offending people. In fact, for Mill, a society that interferes with our liberty simply because we offend someone doesn’t deserve the name “free”. Just doesn’t deserve it. So if it irks you that someone burns a flag, unless they throw it on your body and burn you, the state has no right to coerce it. It does not have that right. Not if you want to use the word “free” society to mean “free” society, according to Mill. So we are talking about genuine harm and not offence, okay. Now this principle has not only come under assault like I have suggested, from people like Jesse Helms, who consider all the arts since Norman Rockwell to cause genuine harm. It’s also come under some assault – and I don’t intend to assault these potential political allies by talking about it too much – by feminists, who consider issues like pornography to be very problematic in this regard. Because on this strong account of genuine harm I am giving, war toys and pornography also don’t count as genuine harm unless someone takes playboy and whams it through your midbrain or takes a war toy and hits you with it. Because if the Harm Principle does not mean genuine harm – it means this sort of amorphous social harm – then it’s really no secure principle at all, right? Because then Jesse Helms might get elected, and God knows what he thinks might harm everyone. It might harm you watch TV, it might harm you to read a book. So the genuine Harm Principle needs to be stated in this rather vigorous way because what it’s trying to back up, among other things are the freedoms that were won by the American revolutionaries in the Bill of Rights. The constitution itself on my historical view is a conservative counter-revolutionary document. The Bill of Rights on the other hand is what the revolutionaries got to go along with the deal. They wouldn’t go along… we fought too hard to have worse laws than the English have, we’ve got to put a Bill of Rights on it. So I come from a Bill of Rights tradition of freedom, in my own view. And I think there’s where the Harm Principle applies. This kind of freedom admittedly leads to a society where very sick people do very sick things and we get real mad about it. The alternative is a famous slippery slope, and that’s when you start stopping them without a principle because you are offended. Even if bunches of you are offended, somebody’s got to decide. Mill’s idea is that once you give that power to anyone, you’ve lost liberty. You have lost it. It’s like getting a little bit pregnant, once you lose a little bit of it, it’s over… or being just a little bit [pregnant]. It’s over. It’s that fundamental a principle for Mill. Now the conservative counter principle oddly enough… and I am using conservative loosely here, because this gets messed up all over the board. But a counter principle here is the Offence Principle, and you have all heard it thrown out in public debate as well. And that’s where society has a legitimate right to socially coerce people to keep them from offending others. And then that requires a further argument because such offence, and here is the famous phrase from a long gone debate: “Because such offence undermines the moral tone of society”. Well you know Mill wouldn’t have bought that, I mean, it’s too mucky. But think how often you have heard it in debate: “Well we can’t have those Mapplethorpes, if people look at them it will undermine the moral tone… Well that’s not a good argument, I am sorry. If you are in this Mill tradition of the Bill of Rights, that’s not a good argument. Now, there is an argument in the Mill tradition that helps and that’s that we also – because we don’t have the right to coerce people – we don’t have the right to drag people down to a Mapplethorpe exhibit and cement their eyes open, and glue their face to one of Mapplethorpe’s, you know, pictures… to try to… it’s hard to do this, you know, in a general way. [crowd laughter] Similarly, TV. And this is a very difficult argument for me now because it’s hard to know what turning off television would be like. [crowd laughter]. I mean we used to watch it, now it watches us. How do you turn it off? [crowd laughter]. But I mean Mill’s idea would be: “Well, turn it off if you don’t like it”. Now, that’s become more problematic. I really think it has. Because TV plays an enormous role in creating social reality, it is not a simple part of it. It is not a home appliance. That’s a big mistake, to think about your TV as just an appliance. I mean to use a Platonic metaphor, it is “The eye of God“. It’s in your house, and it’s scary, and it’s there. It is more real in a way, and more frightening. In any case that makes us wonder about whether we could maintain the genuine Harm Principle or not. But the major way in which this principle has been attacked is because this principle – “Genuine Harm” – makes a distinction between self regarding actions: those that only affect me, and other regarding actions: those that affect other folks. That distinction is where people try to attack the Harm Principle. Because some people argue there is no such thing as purely self regarding actions. For example, by Mill’s analysis, if someone wants to be a druggie and has a good enough supply of drugs that they don’t run out and harm others, because if they do that then they violate the principle. But if you are a druggie and you want to sit around all your life and do drugs, that’s a purely, on Mill’s account, self regarding action, and the State has no business stopping you. On the other hand, if you want to go out and shoot up the neighbourhood click-click-click-click- click, hit all the kiddies, get your face, you know, usually a swarthy one, in one of Barbara Bush’s commercials that will later appear in some Republican presidential ad. If you want to go out and do that, you have violated the Harm Principle. Now here’s the possible objection to Mill’s principle. Is it really true that there are self regarding actions? Or isn’t it true that the junkie, in his relations with others – which he hardly could separate himself from totally – isn’t going to have effects that will lead to genuine harm. So there is room for debate over the Harm Principle. My own inclination is to stick with it. I mean, that’s my inclination. The Harm Principle though, you need to understand, is very important to the way that our society understands its legal codes, and some of our best justices have appealed to it over and over. The two principles – I want to mention them again – that stand in the way of it, or at dispute with it. One is the Offence Principle I have already mentioned. The other is a principle of Paternalism. And it’s a principle that I have to admit – given my political proclivities I have to admit it, it’s okay – that the liberal tradition at least in its earlier incarnations was guilty of. And that’s the Paternalism Principle. Which is we can interfere with people for their own good. That also is inconsistent with Mill, because on Mill’s view of liberty, the best judge of your own good is you. Which would have led, if you had believed a Mill style liberty argument, and combined it with an argument I am about to make in a minute, you would have had an elegant public policy for dealing with poverty. And that’s to close down a multi-trillion dollar bureaucracy and give poor people money. Under the principle that free people will know better how to spend their money than others know how to spend it for them. And since what makes poor people poor is that they don’t have money, it seems remarkably elegant to solve the problem by giving it to them. It is so remarkably and shockingly elegant, all it would do is reduce the population of this city by one half. I mean that’s all it would… [take]. And they could go live somewhere else, right? There would be more room to walk around the parks and stuff. No joke, I mean if that’s poverty – not having money – reducing it would be giving money. And the only counter argument must come from this spirit of Paternalism. That means someone must know better than they do how to spend it. Again, on Mill’s grounds that’s not a very good account of liberty. Now let me give some dimensions to the Harm Principle and then I am through with Mill’s account of Liberty, even though we will return to it if you would like. The Harm Principle has some dimensions that Mill discusses. Harm to others, I have already mentioned, is genuine harm. Mill discusses harm to self. Mill doesn’t seem to have a good argument against suicide, okay. Doesn’t seem to. If anything is a self regarding action, that might look like one, you know. That’s it, I am out of it, don’t worry about it. Especially if you leave enough insurance to handle it, right, it doesn’t… and if you have a suicide thing [cover]… anyway. Well, the way that that’s been handled in the Mill tradition is that social coercion can be used there if it can be shown that the person engaging in the action… that their decision is encumbered. And it’s important that we don’t make that a fuzzy principle. By encumbered decision, we mean these examples I have been using, like a potential suicide, a drug addict, or someone who is a head banger. You know, a psychotic who is a head banger. Then, even though they are only harming themselves, even by Mill’s principles, later “Millians” have admitted that we – that the state – might have the right if their decision is clearly encumbered. But you have to be careful, because you’ll get some conservative on the abortion issue arguing that no woman could choose there, because under that emotional stress her decision is encumbered. No, that’s wrong. Mill’s encumbered principle means really encumbered: crazy, dog drunk, that kind of thing. Not, you know, “I am upset today, so I can’t be free”, no, you’ve got to be really out of it okay. The second, I mean the third… there’s harm to others, harm to self… Another dimension that I haven’t mentioned yet is very important to see. And this is one where I think Mill, and later people in his tradition have given up too much. And that’s that our freedoms can be curtailed if they interfere with the freedoms of others. Not just genuine harm, but if our freedoms interfere with other people’s freedoms. Now, while I will admit that that can sometimes happen, I think that the use of that argument against Mill’s strong principle has been largely invidious. That means, you know, you’ve got the Secretary of State and his hand picked audience of 8000 people all cheering and yelling, and one person shouts and they throw him out because he is interfering with the 8000 people’s right to free speech. Well that’s Mill backwards, because Mill had this idea in order to protect the rights, not of everybody who agrees, because you don’t need your rights protected. If you are in a room full of 100 people and 90 of them agree on something, they don’t need their rights protected on that issue, right? Because they all agree. It’s the four or five lunatics that may have something creative and new to add to the discussion without which you can’t have democracy, and without which this principle, you know, won’t flourish. And I hate to mention it, but it’s not different than Chairman Mao’s principle. Let a thousand schools of though contend, let a thousand flowers bloom, I mean… the idea is that even the most whacko ideas, in a free society, get heard. And that’s a deeply American principle too. I mean, Thoreau argued that anyone who was more right than his neighbours was a majority of one already. The truth is not majoritarian. True things are true for the simple and tautological reason that they are true. And votes don’t count. George Bush can get 98 votes… percent… and it don’t mean he’s right, or that he’s telling the truth. It won’t mean that, because truth is… you don’t vote on it… it’s not a voting matter. True things are true because they are true, not because people believe them, even if overwhelming numbers believe them. Okay that’s all on Mill for now. Mill’s account of freedom has become very famous, and it’s had a very salutary impact in political theory, but it has a profound limitation. And this has been pointed out by Sir Isaiah Berlin and others. It is an account of what Berlin calls “negative freedom” only. In other words, it is an account of freedom from constraint, but… it has nothing to say about this incredibly important dimension of freedom: freedom to, or “enabling freedom”, see. There is a difference between freedom from constraint, and freedom to. Well, the first one: freedom from is “negative freedom”, the second: freedom to, is positive… You can take those as value neutral words, I mean, Berlin did. They are two different traditions of talking about liberty. Freedom to, “enabling freedom” is best introduced – and I’ll hold up another book – a good discussion of it is in Marx’s “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts“, but Voltaire and others have discussed positive freedom, so it’s not just Marx, but other people too… and I intend to. The need for a concept of positive freedom – not to overcome Mill’s important principle, but to supplement it – seems to me obvious. Because here is a dimension of freedom that Mill’s argument won’t handle. It’s summed up in the famous French joke: “The rich and the poor are equally free to sleep under the bridges at night”. One suspects such a concept of freedom is very poverty stricken. I do. I think that’s a very thin notion. Like I think the notion of “volunteer” is a very thin notion. McDonalds, Jail. High percentages in both. Drugs in the street, the army, volunteer. Very thin notion of volunteer. Freedom, to mean something, has to have a positive component. A component that enables you to exercise your rights. The right of free speech is no good if you haven’t been enabled by education to talk well, and to speak and find a place to speak. The right to travel freely is no good if you don’t have a car. And even simple rights, like the right to survive – forget pursue happiness – just [the right] to survive. That right, which ought to be a right. You know, by “ought”, I am appealing to Kantian insights. Which ought to be a right. Even that right can’t be secured if you don’t have enough money for a hamburger at least, or a Baby Ruth or whatever. So, clearly there is a need for a principle of positive freedom that enables people to do something. Let me make the distinction clear again. As far as I know there are no laws or juridical rules that constrain me from owning Mobil Oil, being best friends with Mel Gibson, or dating Kathleen Turner. However, I am missing some of the enabling conditions. [crowd laughter]. I don’t have enough money to buy the oil, I am a little too short and fat, you know, to be a friend of Mel’s… and Kathleen Turner is out of the question. [crowd laughter] But, the point is very important, and especially if we are going to bandy this word “democracy” and “freedom”… these words around. Because you can’t have a free society that doesn’t have positive freedoms for people… that doesn’t enable them to exercise freedoms. Has to be more… a thicker notion. Now the debate would come on: how thick does the notion have to be? You know. Well, for Marx, as you know, infamously, and he’s supposed to be dead wrong… it’s supposed to be so thick that “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need“. Which is a principle, as you may have noticed, that people that work for the Bechtel Corporation observe among each other… Seriously. You know, I hate to sound like a Commie, but the ruling class treat each other like good socialist buddies. They don’t much let each other get in trouble. Back each other up. They don’t let each other go broke. Continental Bank can’t go broke, but you can. Bankruptcy courts are filled with folks… so they seem to have… there’s kind of a socialism there. It’s almost a Brotherhood. Brotherhood is not really a sexist word, because it’s the right word. It’s descriptive. It’s kind of a brotherhood. Well, a whole civil society in which people aided one another in that way would be great if voluntary. This was of course going to be one of Reagan’s ideas… a great thing. We’ll have everybody do it with a telethon, or something. I always use telethons as a kind of a joke, you know… Poor people? Have a telethon. I mean, it’s a Hollywood solution. Okay now, to a third… Actually, I haven’t discussed in detail Marx’s theory of freedom, but it grows… Or his view of freedom, because he doesn’t really… he’s not a philosopher, he doesn’t really have a view of it. He has a critique of the other view. Of the negative one. Hegel has a fuller view, and I am going to mention his very quickly. For Hegel, freedom is more like a placeholder word. Let me try to explain what I mean by that. For Hegel, freedom is so important that it is the meaning and the point of human history in general. That if one asks about the bible: “Quickly, what’s it about?”, someone will go “The devil did it”, right? And that’s a quick account of the plot. Then if you ask Hegel quickly about history, Hegel will go: “It’s about how freedom wins”. Hegel’s account of freedom is more sophisticated in a way than any I have given you up until now, because it is deeply historical. Here’s what I mean by that. In any given historical epoch, Hegel says: “Show me the obstacles that Human beings saw in their path to realising their concrete goals and the overcoming of those obstacles will receive the name Freedom”. Now, the nice thing about that concept of freedom is it is a free concept of it, which means it allows each generation to pursue freedom’s goals, maybe reformulating them anew. All I have done is backtrack to the 19th Century, contrast positive and negative freedom… tried to do that. But the Hegelian concept is historical and reminds us that when we formulate these goals… you know, they are the work of each new group that comes along in the struggle for freedom. For Hegel, freedom isn’t either external or internal or positive or negative. Freedom is not something which people have, to quote Alasdair MacIntyre on Hegel’s view of freedom: “It’s not something that people have. It is what they are”. When they don’t have it, they aren’t. And that doesn’t mean they disappear, it means they are not human without it. And so, in Hegel, I think that for many satisfying reasons – and that’s why I am doing it here today – there are many satisfying reasons to bring the official history of ethics to a close with Hegel. In other words, Hegel’s view is kind of like the last trump. It says: you give me the best moral views that go out of your community, the limitations they face, wherever you happen to be and whenever they are, and the struggle to overcome those things, with those goals, that’s freedom. And I think that will give us… I agree with MacIntyre, that gives us the most satisfying view because it’s the most historical, and it also reminds us that there is no eternal idea of freedom, but only the struggle for freedom. Which is consistent with Martin Luther King’s remarks, because while he made remarks about freedom, the struggle for his kinds of freedoms and other people’s struggles as well. Rosa Parks, among others. Where struggles for certain direct freedoms that were the overcoming of concrete limitations of a given time and place. So the challenge of freedom will be to find the new boundaries, and how to break them down. That is what freedom will be about. Well, it’s a scary concept of freedom, because it’s been glossed in the following way by Engels, who quotes Goethe’s “Faust” and says that: “The principle of freedom here is that all that exists deserves to perish”. Which as you know is what Mephistopheles says in Faust. But it’s meant in a kind of funny way, in other words: “All that exists has not yet lived up to freedom, so it deserves to change, to perish, to give way to something more free”. So there is a little bit of sympathy for the devil in Hegel’s account, and I don’t mind that being the case. While it would be satisfying to end with Hegel’s account of freedom, I must say that starting tomorrow I am going to switch the course of these accounts of human conduct. Because now I have brought you up to the 19th Century following various models of human conduct until we got to that most peculiar kind of human conduct, the struggle to be free. Which obviously I have placed a very high value on. Now why did I do that? Because, for me, it trumps the others. Whatever your project; to build a character of a certain kind, to be virtuous in a certain way, or to act in a certain way, you can’t do it if you are not free. In that sense, freedom is the trump card in social and political life. In other words, in everything that you want to pursue, of all these various ways and modes of living I have discussed today, freedom is an enabling thing to do it. I mean, it will either enable or block you, whether you are free to do it. You may be forced to act as though you are free, but to really get there you have to really overcome obstacles. That’s the concrete part of it. It’s why it is very important to remember that. And so actually with today’s lecture, in a way, the sort of official philosophy part ends with Hegel and we will move on to a transition from philosophy proper – where we discuss, you know, ethical theories – to a discussion of human beings as they find themselves in societies, political institutions, homes, clubs, families, and bars. In other words, folks and how they are going to get by. We need to understand that that kind of account is not mundane or beneath the level of academics or theory. It’s very important. As I say, it is the condition for the possibility of higher orders of talk. All they represent – the university system – all it represents in this regard is a very high level development of the intellectual division of labour until it is divided into such small segments that only eight people can talk to eight other people. So, to sort of drop beneath that level is not to drop into something mundane and uninteresting, but is to get down where very interesting things happen. I mean with Hegel, I agree that the most extraordinary thing… Tomorrow, as we start discussing the really deviant philosophers… However, I would like to end with a note from Marx, and just a little note for where we are going. All of the things I have offered today come under the heading of interpretations of human conduct as they have been developed historically. Now I have given rejoinders about the limitations of the account I have given. In other words it’s hemmed in by certain things that I think will be clearer tomorrow. But to quote the 11th thesis on Feuerbach by Marx, a very important point to remember – and especially as a philosopher – is that the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. It’s very interesting to interpret freedom in various ways, but that’s not the point. The point is to actually walk another step down freedom’s highway, so your kids can walk another step down it. If we are still bothering to have them. Given… you know… certain other scenarios about the future. Blade Runner for example. Might decide not to have kids, don’t want them to be cyborgs… I mean, you know… there are reasons people might not have children today. But no, the point is that now we are going to look at a different kind of philosopher. The ones we will discuss tomorrow will include Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, and a little bit of Kierkegaard too, thrown in. And we are going to discuss these people because they begin to question the desire and the drive that was sort of behind philosophy in the first place. So in a certain sense, to the degree they discuss philosophy at all, it’s as meta-philosophers. In other words, they look at philosophy in the way I do. As one cultural institution among others. You know, I mean it’s not a master science of what the world really means. Because there isn’t one. Neither is religion. There is no master discourse like that. If anyone has one, you’ve got a lot better product to sell than anyone I know. Go meet Shirley MacLaine, make five billion dollars in California. That isn’t… You don’t come to philosophy – especially today – in this sort of post-philosophical atmosphere. Not for consolation. Not a good place to come for consolation. The older religions are for that. It’s not a good place, around some just loon like me, to come in order to have your… the things you believe… justified. Unless you have real strange beliefs. And it’s also sort of a warning that it’s dangerous to believe – especially from someone that will present the picture I will tomorrow – what I say. More important that you critically examine what you think. I mean that’s the point. At least I hope it will be the point. Because, you know, sometimes I don’t even care what I say. That must be wrong. Didn’t think about it long enough. So, it always makes me uncomfortable when seeing anyone taking notes… because I don’t! I don’t think that what I say is that important. So remember to be critical. If I am up here saying: “Criticise Authority!”, a real bad feeling is the Monty Python joke, right? “Criticise Authority”. [crowd laughter]
Hegel and Modern Life (1990)
Transcript: Okay. In our last lecture, I ended the history of ethics in a way – what would be a usual introduction to an ethics course – by discussing Hegel’s view of ethics with its… what one might call it… “super concept” of freedom. The very large concept of freedom as formulating those goals and desires of individuals in whatever given historical period. And the idea that freedom represents is to see those goals and obstacles and their overcoming in that period, and to name that activity and those sets of practices “freedom”. Now, that side of Hegel’s philosophy… and Hegel is perhaps the most important philosopher in the 19th Century. Because the people that I will talk about today – at least the first two or three – react against Hegel. So Hegel’s view is very important. But the Hegel I gave you the other day is a very radical Hegel, where freedom is the central notion. But there is another side to Hegel, as many of you may have suspected if you have looked at articles like Fukuyama’s “The End of History“, something like that. There is another side of Hegel, a more conservative side that argues that while his view remains historical, that history as it were, the context within which all activities, truth and so on gets its meaning and in which human beings become what he calls “spirit”… The conservative Hegel – that reading of Hegel – he argues that the culmination of this long historical process is something like the Prussian State, or on an updated reading like Fukiyama’s – and this is one I think perfectly fits what George Bush means by the “New World Order” – it means that history proper is at an end. This is a very strange notion because we still, I think, to some extent think historically. History proper is at an end, because the human race has found the right ideas. Namely, Liberal Democracy. By which we mean the televised pseudo state, to try to speak… and VCRs. Once you have an economy that produces VCRs and stuff, and a pseudo state that gives you the satisfaction of lording it over the rest of the planet… with a social system that doesn’t work… history has reached its end and there are no more battles over big ideas. That’s the point. That as long as the Cold War was going on, there were ideologies and battles between them. Socialism, capitalism and so on… Well, with the end of the cold war… this is the updated version of Hegel’s argument. Well, that’s interesting already because it needed to be updated. See, since Hegel thought it was over in the 19th Century, this more recent article argues that history ended in the 20th Century only to have the Gulf War come along. And if there is one sure sign in Hegel’s philosophy that history isn’t over, of course it’s a war. Because there are embodied people in struggle with different views about what freedom is and how to live. So now there will have to be another update about it being over. So I am very sceptical about that claim, and also the Conservative Hegel for other reasons would not be my favourite. In any case, reacting to the philosophy of Hegel were a whole set of intellectuals, and he has an ambiguous legacy. There were right wing Hegelians and left wing Hegelians. In fact one of the origins of right wing, left wing was not simply where people sat in a French theatre, although that’s another origin of the word. One has to do with these two schools of readings of Hegel. The right wing Hegelians took Hegel to be fundamentally right, and their only task was to apply his method of investigation to subject after subject. In other words, you know, just investigate the Prussian State, spell out explicitly what he hadn’t quite said enough of… I’ve said enough about [that]. The other school of Hegelians were the left wing Hegelians. One of whom later became very famous and he will be the first person I will discuss today as we move beyond what I consider to be rather narrow ethical concerns. While the problems we discussed in the last few lectures I consider important, they are much narrower concerns than the best kind of social arrangements within which human beings can realise their character and so on. And those lead to a whole larger set of issues, so those are the ones we will discuss today. Those are the ones that were raised by Hegel under the word “freedom”, and as I say, the most famous left wing Hegelian to take up the challenge of giving a richer concept of freedom, I have already mentioned was Karl Marx. Marx’s name of course is not used much anymore. You know, this is supposed to be what happened in the last fifteen years, is that definitively his view of the world has been refuted and so on. And I would like to warn against these relatively premature judgements, especially in the long scope of history. After all, Communism as an ideology… In the Soviet Union, the first communist state, began in 1917 and it is hardly a long historical run to go from 1917 to 1989, and to win hearts and minds in two thirds of the world and then be over like that. That is the kind of historical view a culture might have if that culture’s view of history was based on a miniseries. Because then you could go “Well, that was kind of like a miniseries in this longer story”. But as a matter of just historical fact, the text of Marx is a classic text. William Bennett agrees it’s a classic. It’s in the Great Books. So there you go, it’s a classic, okay. No more argument needed, right? Bennet, you know, Bush’s man says it’s a classic, so it’s a classic. And then in the historical sense, it’s still an ambiguous legacy. Because throughout the history of Marxism, based on this Hegelian mode of thought in which concepts change as people change, there was an ongoing criticism – which as we know today in Eastern Europe has led to the overthrow of certain governments – an ongoing criticism within the communist states of communism. That didn’t appear obvious to us over here until these dramatic events, as though they hadn’t been prepared for by a long historical process of criticism. Of course, we were blinded to that on our side of the border for Orwellian reasons. For strictly Orwellian reasons. But now we see, by this period of history, we see that there were quite important social movements. Movements that do deserve the name “democratic” movements, in a way that very few movements in this country deserve the name. I mean a movement that serious – and for democracy in the United States – would have to be either associated with dangerous African Americans, with strange ideas that have made bizarre off the record remarks or something, or else in some other way “ghettoised”. Real movements for Democracy are oddly enough most threatening in nominal democracies. That’s a principle of Hegelian discourse. In other words, if you live by an ideology, the most dangerous ideology to you is your own, because someone may expect you to do what you say. So, in that sense Communist ideology – as many of you know – was never a real threat in the United States, right. Very few Communists got elected to Senate and so on. It’s just not really popular. On the other hand, our own ideologies of Democracy, Freedom, and Equality have been a great danger to our own society. So that’s a dialectical truth and [that] leads me into Marx and Marx’s criticism of capitalism. Because there’s a wide misunderstanding and I need to explain why a criticism of Capitalism is a criticism of Hegel. Because for Hegel, if (that was) the highest expression of humanity was this advent of Capitalism, the liberal democratic state and so on, then a criticism of that State – you know, which had been based on the previous French Revolution and so on – would be a criticism not just of Hegel, but of the state of affairs his philosophy represented. And that was Marx’s real point, not just merely to interpret Hegel or criticise him, but use him as a vehicle to criticise the actual State… in terms of the degree of which… at first, it’s an internal criticism. It’s a criticism of the gap between the promises of the bourgeois State and its practices. And that criticism is launched in terms of the economy. The argument is rather elegant and rather simple. And I mean, Marx has many complicated arguments. I am going to stick to a few from this book: “The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” by Marx. And it’s an inexpensive little book. The problem is… that the democratic state is – and Marx uses a rather strong word here – in contradiction with the imperatives of the Capitalist economy. Now, I am not sure many people would even want to disagree with that any more. I think that we are used to living in a sort of televised environment in which contradictions don’t bother us… as much as they used to. They just make us twinge. In other words, we’ll see a huge picture of rubble on TV and a spokesman will be saying “There was no rubble”… and the rubble is behind him, and we are used to that now. You know, we have lived through periods where Richard Nixon would come on TV and say “I am not a liar” and his eyes would drift off, you know… [crowd laughter] So, we are more used to contradiction than they were, and take it less seriously. We expect it. In fact certain cultural artefacts of our period, like Twin Peaks make a joke out of our ability to accept contradiction. They use it, in a way, as a kind of an irony on our society, that we could accept it with very little difficulty. But this wasn’t true in this period, so it was an important criticism if Marx could show that the imperatives of the economy to accumulate human labour, which for Marx was the key to capital. Not accumulating money. Because money was just a medium, right, that was used to accumulate living labour. That’s what is the fundamental meaning of the alienation of labour for Marx. To put it in really basic terms, it’s this: the secret to capitalism is moving from a society – and this is why it has ethical implications that I would like to draw – moving from a society where the question is “What are you?”, to a society in which the question is “What do you own, or have?”, “What do you do, in the sense of a career, or job, whatever?”. Once human beings are re-described in that way, they are re-described in terms of their work time. Which is not voluntary. I mean, you know, Reagan recognises that, right? He distinguishes voluntarism from work – he’s that smart – and we all know when we are at work, we are not volunteering. And one way you can know – no matter how much you love your job… everybody always tells me “I love my job” – that very few people, when they are given two months off at full pay decide to come in every day and work their butt off. It’s just… we… Americans may love their jobs, but they may also have deep psychological reasons to believe that compensatory thing, namely that they do really love it. They may in fact be devious in some respect that’s deeper than our conscious one, which we will discuss when we get to Freud. So for Marx the crime, as it were, that capital commits, and it’s not… I shouldn’t even use the word “crime”, because it’s purely systemic and it has dual effects, one of which is incredibly positive. The negative effect it has is to reduce the rich amount of human needs to needs that can simply be bought and sold on a marketplace. In other words, to make us understand our needs in terms of marketable needs. And this is almost a boring lecture now, because our need for love, compassion, understanding, for social relations and so many other needs now are all merchandisable. I mean, even if you… one of the kinkiest things people used to do was just have intimate sexual conversations with one another. Now that’s telephonised, and you put it on your VISA, right? I mean, just think of that one example about telephone sex. This is how far Capitalism can go in rationalising what at one time was a very intimate personal exchange, without the mediation of money, into one that becomes marketable. So if you are watching “USA” on television late at night, which I sometimes do, it’s got all those stupid B movies on it. Then here come on a whole stream of lovely young men and women saying “Call me up”, five dollars a minute. So if you are lonely, sad, tired, want a friend… there’s one on the market. That’s the way in which Marx saw relations, as it were, between things. Because commodities are things, even when it’s us. You know, if you are in a room full of people who sell insurance, and you are trying to hire one of them, and you’re the executive, you’re choosing between commodities. Now, someone will immediately object, of course one of the people there may have a better personality… great! That means that that’s a feature of that commodity that’s attractive to you as a buyer. That’s why the person may get the job. So, for Marx, that was the violence it committed. [It] was [that] it not only commodified our relations but our lives, and put the pursuit of things in the place of a whole host of other needs, desires… in fact, the desire just for social relations themselves, which today is a real desire. Just the desire for a genuine social relation or two. One or two genuine social relations. So, now that was the bad part, on the social relations side for Marx. That’s where Capitalism was at loggerheads with the great ideals of freedom and so on, is because such human beings under such an economic system, because of competition with one another for what jobs were available in order to survive within such an economy, where working could only be called “free labour” as a kind of a joke. In other words, whether we work or not, whether we make that as a choice is sort of a joke, right. “Well I can choose not to work”. Well, the streets last night as this city froze were full of people who, I am sure many didn’t choose not to work, right. I doubt that a lot of them are lazy. Like Jesse Jackson, I don’t think that’s the problem with poor people, is that they are lazy. But in any case, if you choose not to work, you may very well find yourself under a bridge at night. One way you can find out, by the way, and this is simple to cut through a lot of the crap you usually hear about class analysis and “there are no classes in America”. Here’s a little empirical test for the audience to try. Don’t work for eight years. Stop working. And if really bad things happen to you, you were in the working class. If at the end of the eight years everything is fine and dandy, you still got a house and a car and a nice place to live and a lot of nice friends, then you were okay. Otherwise you were in the working class. But if you stop working for that long and you are in deep trouble, you were a worker and didn’t know it. That’s a nice empirical test, and I challenge any of you to try it. Someone who denies that there are classes can always give this one a shot, it’s a way to find out if there are… really find out. So those are some of the downsides. Classes are produced with unequal power. Social relations become as it were reified, frozen. Phoney, if you will. The upside is… the upside that… where Marx, I think, praises Capitalism in terms beyond those ever used by William Buckley, as a system that had produced from nature more wonders, more technological wonders than the whole previous history of the world had seen. In other words, the good things Capitalism did was to build railways, medicines and even more importantly: new needs. See, many of you may think that all of this, sort of, negative talk is kind of all left wing, all whining after Bush, and we shouldn’t whine like that. We should be really happy about it, you know. A thousand points of light, that vision thing. But the upside of this is that new needs get produced. And for Marx that was a revolutionary process because the system would never – as productive as it is – there would be no way it could ever catch up to the level of needs produced by it. Have you ever noticed that? Now, think about… Here is another example to think about, please. Remember how good stereo sounded when you first got it instead of mono? You know, mono just played one… sort of flat music… Mono sounded okay when you first got it, because it was better than that scratchy thing that went like this… and you got your first stereo and it was so exciting, and nobody even mentioned that the tapes you played on your stereo had a little hiss in them. But now to just put a tape in something, you hear that hiss… and you think about your friends who have a CD, and they don’t have that hiss. So there’s a new need now for hissless music. [crowd laughter]. All around music, a whole new need… Now apologists for the system want to say “Well that need… you know, we didn’t create that need”. Well that seems highly dubious. Think of commodities like the hula hoop. Does anyone remember the great hula hoop movement in the United States? Where people went around demanding hula hoops? And then the capitalists went: “We’ll make them for you”. [crowd laughter]. Well, no, that movement didn’t occur, see. I mean, there was no social movement called the Hula Hoop movement… and went around: “Hula hoops or death! Hula hoops or death!”, no some jackleg went: “You know, I bet you if we make these things like this, put out a few records, people will be sweet”. And the next thing you know, people needed them. And you just have to be nostalgic not to say they needed them. I mean, I heard someone the other day in the video store, went: “I need this VCR!”, and it was just as dramatic a statement for that person as someone in one of the third world countries that we plunder saying “I need rice!”. I mean, it’s a new need. So Capitalism’s upside is it creates vast new technological abilities which extend the power of the human species. Extend it until we can like, you know, go to the moon, build a CD that doesn’t hiss and so on. That’s the upside of the system. Now, the problem Marx saw was that those two imperatives can come into contradiction. The imperative on the one hand of the economy, which now I am going to state in it’s blunt Wall Street form. Which is to make a profit, which you do by accumulating labour, capital, goods, land and so on. That imperative to create a profit versus the imperative to fulfil all these new needs. So for example… And this is another classic example. Solar energy. Which is technologically available. And so it comes in conflict with the imperative however for profit. In other words, there are ways to make it. And when you hear these words you know they have a contradiction of the kind Marx discussed. When you hear the words “We have the technology but it’s not cost effective”, that phrase means “We have the social forces of production to build it, but it is not consistent with our social relations based on profit. That’s all not being cost effective means. It doesn’t mean the technology isn’t better, won’t meet more needs, won’t be safer, won’t be better for the environment. It just quite simply means that you have a contradiction between social relations that have these needs and the way that they are controlled by an economy that wants profit. And solar energy is only one among many similar examples. You know, there are all of these, sort of, old truck driver stories about the ball bearings they use at NASA, you know. I don’t know if any of those are true. You always hear these sort of stories “Well, at NASA they have ball bearings that are practically frictionless, if we had them in our cars we’d get seven thousand miles a gallon”. Well, I don’t know if that’s true, but it could be. Because clearly our technology… we can get to the moon, we could build a better ball bearing that would like triple gas mileage. That seems fairly clear, that that’s within the capability of our technology. And much else besides, that won’t be pursued because it’s in contradiction with these economic imperatives. Now what does this all have to do with the kinds of lives people lead, and morality? Well, everything. Because, as I tried to argue throughout the course, you give one society, sort of, Greek Tragedy, the theatre, and so on… and Greek ideals as a sort of model for how they live and you get one kind of human being. Renaissance arts, you get another kind of human being with other human projects. Then you get the Brady Bunch and you get another kind of human being, and another set of projects. Now, the vicious way to describe that situation is “ideology“, but it’s an empty term. It simply means that if you want to know how someone thinks, look at how they dress, who they hang out with, where they live, right? The kinds of folks they went to school with, sorta how big is their bank account, and you’ll pretty much know where they are coming from. Which is the banal West Texas way of stating Marx’s theory of ideology, and it’s right! It’s true, you pretty much do! And it’s not a rigid theory, it’s not like you’re never surprised, but you are rarely surprised. It’s the best rough generalisation about social relations that I know of. And it’s supposed to remind us that moral dilemmas of the kind that I discussed last time, which now I am going to distance myself from by calling them merely philosophical dilemmas, have to be understood – and this is the point I want to draw from Marx today – in terms of being different for different classes. In other words, depending on what social situation you come out of, a moral dilemma may be quite different. The moral dilemma about whether to steal, you know, an extra 25,000 on your tax return is a different kind of moral dilemma than the moral dilemma about whether you are going to rob a 7-Eleven to have enough food for the next month. And you would have to be a moral imbecile not to see that there are important differences, right, between those decisions. They may both be decisions concerning theft, but there are important moral differences based on those decisions, simply by virtue of something that to us today seems I think slightly unfair: circumstance. I mean, in our country it’s really horrible to say this, but to call someone poor is not an insult. You haven’t said anything about them. You have talked about their circumstances. There’s a wonderful line in a play by Tennessee Williams where Deborah Kerr and her old father who is the poet – the play is “Night of the Iguana“, I think some of you may have seen it – she and he father come up, and they go “Yes, we are poor” “Well, you say it as though you are proud of it” She goes “I am neither proud nor ashamed, it’s not what we are, it’s just what has happened to us”. It’s really a hard way to think in our country, because one way we allow ourselves… And now I am going to stray from Marx for a moment, because I just use his text. I have not… I don’t really care if it’s “right”. Because I think that to the extent we get something out of books, what we want to get out of them is something that we can use. And I haven’t found any books where I could use all of it, or even most of it. That’s certainly true with this one too. To stray from the text of Marx just a little bit, in our country one of the ways that we can stand to have a society that is so opulent, and it’s impossible to drive into this city and to not feel it… into Washington DC. And see the Pentagon and these amazing buildings and then just see the bridges lined with people sleeping under it at night. How do we accept it? As people who think that we are still human? How do we accept it? And begin even cynically to accept it? Well, part of the reason for that – at least part of the reason – is that at some level we must believe – and now back to this freedom thing again – that it was their own, sort of, choices that got them there. So they are, sort of, in some sense to blame for being there. Now, I’ll admit that no-one ever quite spells it out that clearly. But in political discourse in our country the implication is fairly clear. The implication was there and we accepted it for years, when Ronald Reagan used to hold up the want ads in front of TV: “Well, they don’t have to be there, look…” You know, have you ever looked at the want ads, and what’s on it? You know. There are like, fourteen jobs if you want to be in this dial-a-porn business, okay… there’s a job for you. 28 or 9 jobs at McDonalds, for the rest of them you have to be able to read. That puts a lot of people under bridges already, right… at night? So, a notion of freedom and a society that becomes so callous to the minimal demands of what Marx called “human requirements”… human requirements… it’s not utopian to demand human requirements. That’s the standard objection any time you use the word “Marx” – so that’s why I am sort of getting away from it there – “must be utopian”. No, it’s not utopian to demand that in a world with this kind of technology, that as a moral demand, a society feed, clothe and house its people. A society that doesn’t do it, with the kind of technology and the wealth we have is beneath contempt and makes a mockery of all the previous history of civilisation. And to the extent that that we are silent and among such brigands, we are brigands too. It’s despicable. It’s disgusting. And we have lived with it, and it seems like it’s getting more support every day. I don’t know. It looks like we are in a very dark time. Well, Marx is not exactly the figure to illuminate that time, because he himself became, and his texts… the use of it in another part of the world, like I have been, sort of, implying in my political remarks, just as some of the great texts of Democracy; Jefferson and others, have been misused in this country in hideous ways. I think it’s more than obvious now in Eastern Europe, in China, and in the Soviet Union, that the forms of what I call “State Capitalism” over there had very little to do with the work of Marx. I had a student friend visit the Soviet Union, and the least visited place there… and this was back in the Khrushchev period when they were not quite so, you know, stirred up. The least visited place in the Soviet Union was the Marx-Lenin institute where all the books were. Nobody read all that stuff. In fact a lot of the books had already been removed by Stalinists, the ones that would really upset people. I mean the book here, the one I have discussed has the account of alienation of labour. That wouldn’t go over very well in Stalin’s Russia. Because the fundamental insight here is that if you are working your fanny off on a shop floor in Kiev, it’s hard to know how you are in a worker’s paradise when someone in Detroit is working their fanny off there. The view from the bottom up is the one that seems to me plausible. Under both conditions, something important about your humanity is being lost… under both conditions. And when we look at the conditions I am discussing today, we are not looking at abstract moral conditions. I am not offering a grand abstract theory of them. I am trying to give something like a rough account of the fabric of daily life… a rough account of it, because it’s too rich. Especially in this country, once you get off the interstate, the fabric of daily life is very rich. Something like the distinction I would want to make between a sort of theoretical approach, and an approach more rooted in daily life to the issues that we will be discussing. I am just laying some of them out now… It’s the difference between driving cross country on the interstate – or flying over it – and then occasionally taking the back roads. This is very interesting, driving through the South, but it’s also interesting driving through the Midwest. Because the United States is not the kind of country… you notice how after Hegel, we started giving a theory of the present and stuff? See, that was what we promised we would do. It’s that philosophy at its best should be our time comprehended in thought. That keeps it from being what Nietzsche says, sort of, “a museum of ideas”… says, you know, “Which was built for loafers in the garden of knowledge”. I am pretty sure that is right. Well, for philosophy to be more than that sort of “museum of ideas built for loafers in the garden of knowledge”, it needs to give an intransigent account of conditions in the present. Now, it could be wrong, okay. I told you I was a fallibilist. What I am saying now could be wrong, but that shouldn’t be decided by slogans or TV commercials, or by Willie Horton ads, but by debate. By argument, among a public body, public citizens, you know, talking and arguing. Now, the further problem – and this is a problem that Marx in part is implicated in – is the way in which political discourse has, as it were, dried up and narrowed. The things about which we can debate, the topics which are open for alternatives and for other explanations and descriptions. And this is the deep sense in which I have used the words “pseudo-democracy” instead of “democracy” throughout, because even in its Greek form where it was limited only to Greeks who were citizens – not slaves and not foreigners – even there, the institutions of representation where people can be recalled much quicker. See it’s harder to recall someone once they get into this city. Not many come back “We didn’t like it”… and again, why not? Well because in the current situation – as many events that have just happened, I think, indicate – political power and economic power are deeply interlocked. It seems to me hardly accidental that most of the people in the senate are millionaires. I think all but – what – one or two? They are all millionaires. Is that just an accident? An accidental relation? Most of them white guys, notice that? Accidental relation? No. See, that’s the kind of prima facie evidence one should look at. You should go: “Well, that just looks like a bunch of white guys in some really rich club in New York”. Well, it is like them! In fact, when they go to New York, it is them! Now, that’s not a conspiracy theory, because all of them appear on your TV and tell you they are running your lives. So it’s not a conspiracy. The deep insight Marx has – and it’s really an important one – is that whatever… and by the way this is not a sufficient condition for what we would like to call a “good” or “excellent” human life, but it’s a necessary condition – necessary, but not sufficient – is that you not have your life reduced to total poverty. That’s this… In other words, it’s not enough to just be free from constraints. You can’t be just reduced to penury and then say that person has a free life. And on the other hand, you can’t have your life reduced to work – no matter how high the wage – and have it be a really excellent life. That reduction of life to work itself cripples life, and cripples the challenge to become something else; larger, other. And it’s only in that sense that we’ve started with these philosophical ideals. Because each one of them points the way at projects other than – right? – other than simply being the person who sold the most tyres. Who pushed the most papers through the largest office. Each one of them. In that regard, let me refer back to a really old one. Alexander the Great on finding a sceptic in the streets. A really famous philosopher. And this guy was really, just, totally otherworldly. All he did is just think and lay in the streets, and he was really dirty. And some of Alexander the Great’s officers… and by the way Alexander the Great did better than George Bush ever will. Conquered the whole world, you know, and he was what? 26 or so, younger than Dan Quayle, probably just as short. [crowd laughter]. And he sees this old philosopher lying in the streets and he said “Well if I wasn’t Alexander, I would want to be that man”. The reason is that they both had extreme and extremely interesting projects. It’s hard for us to even have a sense for a project like that now. Because our projects have been reduced to a series of bills, petty annoyances, and in our spare time, the search for what little meaning is left over from all that busyness and chatter that goes into that process. Now this is not… I mean, I am aiming at this audience, because we are here. So please do not get confused, I am not a foreign agent. I don’t know a government in the world where I couldn’t say similar things and in most governments… some, worse… Now, I don’t want any complacency about my lecture or that to be viewed as me pulling back from what I have said. Because it is no argument, and it never has been, to say “Our tribe is a little better than everybody else’s, so that’s fine”. You know why that’s no argument, don’t you? Well if you are among tribes of savages and you only lop off 20,000 heads a year as opposed to 19, that’s no lopping off heads argument. Even if you are the greatest tribe in the world. A claim that we believe a priori true. In any case, and now to try to summarise these, sort of, far ranging and sort of nasty anti- republican polemics here or whatever… “left wing” talk. What I have been trying to fill out today for you is a richer notion of freedom in which we recognise that before moral problems really come up in the philosophical sense, before they really come up there are conditions for human life that have to be fulfilled, which I call “necessary human requirements”. They are not sufficient to live a good life, but they are necessary. Among them are; food, shelter, ordinary health care. Real exciting, huh? See, that’s not as much fun as Kant, but they’re real important. Because without that, it’s hard to follow the Categorical Imperative. You know, it’s easier to follow a ham sandwich without that. So that’s a necessary but not sufficient condition for a good life. It’s also – and this is a more radical claim – it’s also a necessary but not a sufficient condition that one have the freedom in one’s life to pursue other goals than work, and in a strong sense. I am not talking now about getting a hobby, but a life not reduced to work. Not reduced to work. A life where when you go to a cocktail party and they go… they don’t go “What are you?”, they go “What do you do?”, and you don’t have to answer with your job description. Which is another way of asking “Who are you?” in a metaphysical sense, right? That accounts for a lot of the Phil Donahue shows. Women show up and are embarrassed to go “I am a homeworker, I work at home”. Why would that be a problem? Well in a capitalist economy, it’s a terrible problem, and here’s why. Because housework is unwaged, and since we value labour by the wage it brings, it’s not surprising that an old person in a rest home’s ability to tell a beautiful story is not valued, because it is not waged. You go into an old folk’s home… I mean, we ought to realise this… we will either be old or we will face another alternative that’s unpleasant. You go to an old folk’s home, that’s unwaged labour. Their whittling and their storytelling. It’s not valued in our culture, in our society. It’s not waged. Housework, no matter how many kids you raise, it’s not really valued. Oh come on, they’ll say something about you on the Today show if you live to be 100: “This woman lived to be 100, had nine kids”. Then you get a little clap and that’s it. [crowd laughter]. Other than that, very little social value. All that unwaged labour. The reason it’s not valued is because it’s not waged. Donald Trump, you know, he opens a hotel. Huge wage, huge value to his labour. Well what the hell did he do? Talk to Merv Griffin in a room for three minutes. And that’s more valuable than some old man who has lived 90 years worth of experience and can tell a story about his life in which you might find a human meaning. A society that produces that situation is pathological. It neither has nor deserves a very long existence.
Nietzsche: Knowledge and Belief (1990)
Transcript: Last time, in our last lecture, we were screaming about the United States government and its many failings. I want to make clear something, and it’s… unfortunately in the current context… I must tell you that many of you who came here to hear a course on “Philosophy and Human Values” probably expected more “Philosophy” and less on the “Human Values” side. Well, I hope some of you were here yesterday when I ran through a series of ethical theories, and I think I gave some arguments. That was my “professionalising” work. In other words, that was the display of my rough credentials to do this. Now, I am onto a topic of which I consider… and so far in a way, it’s just groundwork for the other stuff, because all of the great ethical theories of the past in a way do contain utopian moments. In a way, being a Stoic, an Epicurean, being someone who pursues Excellence, are all interesting and historically recoverable – in a certain sense – projects. What I have pointed out today is that situation in which we find ourselves in – modern life, in the present – means that there are other conditions that must be met to even pursue those projects. So, I don’t see the two sets of remarks as different as you might think. It’s not as though I did philosophy one day and politics the next, because such watertight distinctions are not viable between philosophy and politics. And again, before I return to Marx, let me try to indicate that the priority of politics is marked even in the Greeks, where the last thing that Aristotle wrote was a constitution for Athens. He wrote that, you know, last, after he had written the Metaphysics, the Physics, the Logic and all this. I have a feeling that he thought that constitution as important as anything he wrote. We certainly know about Plato writing The Republic, that that remark about the best kind of state, and that debate in Plato is certainly as important as anything he wrote. So, in a way, even the classic philosophers – the ones that the people from the National Association of Scholars love – understand that politics, as it were, sets those boundary conditions and those necessary conditions within which human beings can pursue things like a good life for themselves. And so, those are the conditions that I was discussing last time, and trying to discuss then in the context of the present. And for that I have found Marx helpful in one respect. I want to point out something about that though. There is a severe problem with the writings and the work of Marx that is all too obvious to us today. And that’s that the assumption that workers shaping and forming their own modes of work wouldn’t fall victim to the power of the State, which would now step in in place of a capitalist class, exploit their labour in the same way… not exactly in the same way, you know, they’d use different words and all that. As I say, pretty much from the bottom it’s hard to tell the difference. But, you know, they’d use a different ideology… but his expectation that the State would do more than administer, and actually control the life of people, was an absolute blind spot in his work. But then look at our Liberal theorists. For them an equal blind spot is that while they may pay lip service to wanting to constrain the State, you know, and let free enterprise flourish – that led, when it was tried, and it hasn’t been tried in a long time – when it was tried, it led to a great deep worldwide depression that scared the capitalist class so much that no-one has ever tried it again since. And no-one plans to. President Reagan came into office promising to shrink the size of the state. As you may know, as a matter of fact it is larger than ever. So that the process of a world becoming bureaucratically more complex and intrusive at the level of the state is a world phenomenon. It’s not localisable. The process of an economy becoming ever more diverse. Commodifying ever more sections of our lives. Until we’ve replaced the “sunday stroll”, to use another example. I mean, I’m old enough to remember that. When I’d go with my grandad, and we’d go for a stroll on Sunday. Well that can’t be done now without a relation to the commodity. Well it could be, but rarely is. We are socialised to go for a stroll someplace else on Sunday now. The mall is open in the afternoon. Even in North Carolina, after church, they open it up… after church. You stroll through the mall. So that you can both stroll, and shop. Sort of, the strolling aspect is still important. I mean I’m not saying it’s not kind of kinky to walk around and watch people buy things, you know. It’s amusing. So, I don’t want you to think that Marx has a critique of capitalism only, and that’s all I am interested in. The critique of the state and the state bureaucracy is also important. And I have mentioned the name of Max Weber, but I didn’t bring in any of his books. They are real thick, real boring, and I have suggested that a sense for what a modern bureaucracy is like can be evoked from reading the novels of Franz Kafka. Things like “Before the Law” and “The Trial” give you more of a sense of being caught in a modern bureaucracy. And all of you have that sense anyway. If you’ve, you know, moved to a new city and tried to hook up a telephone, and they say: “Go to room 238”. You go to room 238, and they say “Where did you come from? Who did you talk to?”. You go “I forgot”. They go, “Oh no, you’ll have to go back to room 104”. You go to 104, 104 says “You’ve been to 232? Well, you can’t come to room 104”. [crowd laughter]. And we all know this. And so for that go to… I mean that’s what modern bureaucracies look and feel like, you know. So for that go to Kafka. So, what I was trying to develop last time was a criticism of the State, and the economy. Of a new arising global order… that now, I guess has become popular enough to deserve the moniker “New Order”. A new order. I am always suspicious of new orders. So now I am going to drop back a level and look at some of the other factors that go into the formation of human values other than – although I still think these are crucially important – other than the economic ones. And for that purpose, I just can’t restrain myself from looking at a couple more of the critics of Modernity. You might call it critics of modern life, of the modern state, the modern economy, and of the conditions in which a modern culture is formed. And one of those critics that I think has come under fire in Time magazine and elsewhere, is Nietzsche. You may have heard of him: Nietzsche. It’s very popular now to see Nietzsche as, sort of, the new threat. You know, in the sixties the right wing was worried that too many college professors read Marx. They don’t worry about that anymore. [crowd laughter]. People like Jon Elster run huge institutes. They’re analytic Marxists, that’s respectable. Now you are looked at, sort of, you know, just a little funny if your interest is in Nietzsche. And I’ll try to explain first what’s supposed to be so scandalous about Nietzsche. Nietzsche is supposed to hold the scandalous view that knowledge is a form of power. Now that is scandalous because knowledge is knowledge. It’s objective. You know, like journalism. [crowd laughter]. And it would be scandalous to show that wherever we find knowledge, we will find it structured and constructed around a system (or systems) of power. Won’t find one without the other. Now, one can think of this along the simplest pedagogical models. By that I mean the classroom models. I mean, I ought to know this from teaching the university. I know how to pass along knowledge. To get someone to believe me in the last analysis, I give them an “A”, which I could replace with a “happy face”. They are used to that, it’s from kindergarten. They are both just symbols, right, of achievement. They’re not getting paid for this stuff, right. Just give them a little “A”, they smile. That same system starts in kindergarten: “happy face”… “A”… runs through to “F”. “F”, no face… blank. The same thing would work in kindergarten. That form I used looks fair. I mean, I am grading objectively. But the point is deeper. That what the knowledge is based on is my spot of power as the teacher. That’s what it’s based on. Now, you would go: “oh no – it’s based on what’s really true!”. Yeah, but… but… how does that get meted out and parsed out? Who decides that? Well the blunt and ugly answer is: we do. The teachers do. We decide. Now you are gonna… There are clear counter examples to Nietzsche’s argument. In mathematics at its simplest levels, I will grant you, that if we are doing a mathematics course, I could grade objectively. But I will also grant you that nothing of great importance to human values hangs on truths that everyone can accept. That two plus two is four, that A is A… are all acceptable… and they are acceptable precisely because nothing of very great human importance hangs on them. The moment you go a little beyond that in any direction, even in math class, when you discuss for example the philosophy of mathematics, then the disputes start, and then power at some point has to insert itself and decide. So, an important part of Nietzsche’s investigation is in the interconnection between forms of knowledge and power. Forms of – and for the purposes of our course – forms of ethical behaviour and power are the subject of his most important book. Well, maybe not his most important, but certainly the one… that is the most coherent: “On the Genealogy of Morals” by Nietzsche. And in this book – and I am going to talk about it just briefly – Nietzsche talks about not what’s right and wrong in the way we did in previous lectures -good or bad actions – but the word “genealogy” talks about what were the origins of the situations within which we make the value judgements. In other words, from where did this distinction come. Good, bad, right, wrong, and so on? Now Nietzsche’s argument is rather abrasive. It’s certainly provocative, and “The Genealogy of Morals” traces the moral form of discourse – good, bad, right, wrong – back to originally – and again, remember this is 19th Century Germans again – back to the Greeks. Now, here Nietzsche talks about the Greeks as having… and the word he uses is very important, and this will move us finally back to our account of the present. Nietzsche talks about the translation of “Virtue”. What was Virtue for the Greeks? Nietzsche was a philologist who could never get a normal job as a professor, because he was a little nuts, okay. And anyway… that wouldn’t have stopped him now, but it stopped him then. [crowd laughter]. For the Greeks, Virtue… when I said the word, I could see all of you go: “Oh, virtue…”. Yeah, it wasn’t like that for the Greeks. I have already given you the Greek ideal of Odysseus, where Virtue included the ability to be a clever liar. In other words, knowing when and who to con was important. That’s not part of the Victorian idea of virtue, but it’s part of the Greek ideal of it. And so Virtue for them meant this “Excellence” in being well rounded. It meant to be excellent at revenge, so that – unlike the Christian ideal of Virtue – if someone strikes you, you strike them back, and the reason you do that is because if you don’t it will offend them worse. It will hurt their honour and yours. Much more virtuous to hit them back, and then both your honours are intact. It will only humiliate them to turn your face, as though they were unworthy scum. No, hit them back. So Nietzsche discusses this use of virtue, and the Greek evaluation he calls “noble”. Now, “noble” for Nietzsche is not itself a term of value, but a kind of descriptive term of the way the Greeks evaluated. And he himself is not doing ethics the way I was doing it the other day. This is not it. He is giving, as it were, a genealogy. A history of the way in which we have come to use these words. For Nietzsche the key movement in the way the words “good”, “bad”, “right” and “wrong” occur, occur around the word “virtue”, and occur with the Christian transformation of virtue. From something active, based on Excellence into something filled with what Nietzsche calls “resentment“. And I guess there is a simple way to make the argument – and I am trying to keep my remarks here at a level where they are debatable – what he means is something like this. For the Greeks, you know, someone who was strong enough to sin and went ahead and sinned. Which meant they did what they wanted to and enjoyed it. And for the Greeks, that was good. The Christian idea of “virtue” which includes the idea of “guilt” and “sin” meant that you wanted to do something real bad and you don’t. And they’re frustrated and filled with resentment towards those sinners who go ahead and do what they want to do. And you turn the name of your fault – cowardice – into a virtue: “virtue”. Really you just didn’t have the guts to go ahead and do what you wanted to do. [I am] trying to make it sound even slimier than it is, but this is Nietzsche’s argument. In other words you didn’t have the strength to go ahead and pursue what you really wanted. And so your name for that inability is your virtue: you didn’t do it [whispers] because it’s wrong. Well we know that doesn’t work out – frequently – because we have several notorious cases. The Jimmy Swaggart case shows that the most virtuous sometimes fall. But it’s worse than that. As Nietzsche says this Christian notion of virtue is a double trap. Because let’s suppose someone who has the strength to pursue excellence goes ahead and does what what they want to do and finds satisfaction. Then because the whole field within which right and wrong is understood in the Christian era is different than the whole field within which right and wrong is understood in an earlier period, when you go ahead and do that, then you pay another price: guilt. That’s when you internally torment yourself for the very paradoxical and perverse reason that you did what you wanted to do. You know, “Damn, I’m so bad, I did what I wanted to do”. You don’t do what you want to do and you feel, as it were, helpless but a little bit smug and then resentful towards others that do otherwise. That’s resentment. Or you go ahead and do it and then feel guilty and have resentment towards yourself. So Nietzsche talks about this reversal of values as a reversal of values from the Greek values, and the key word is “virtue”. Virtue is very differently understood in the Victorian era, and this is what Nietzsche talks about in “The Genealogy of Morals”. If… One of the things the argument does, whether you like it or not… or whether you accept it or not, and I have only outlined it in kind of a snide, quick way here today. Whether you like it or not, the interesting part of Nietzsche’s project is that what we could see… and I haven’t done that in here, but what we could have presented as eternal problems of morality… in Nietzsche’s account we become very aware that these so called “eternal” problems change radically depending on where you happen to be in history. What gets called “good” is different if you happen to be in one society – or one historical period – and in another. Now that seems like the shocking claim that “it’s all relative”, right? That’s where Nietzsche is supposed to be so abominably bad for a real humanistic education. That it’s all relative. Well this has never… this is not a part of the argument. What Nietzsche is trying to show is that knowledge, truth, objectivity and good and bad have conditions for possibility. And those conditions for possibility change. That doesn’t destroy what seems to be someone who lives in the Victorian period’s right to call someone a sinner. In fact it’s a condition for the possibility of them doing it. You see what I mean. It’s not that everything is relative. It’s that there are conditions within which evaluations take place that themselves require analysis. In other words his account is not a moral theory, but it is a theory about how we have come to have the moral theories we do have… how we have come to have the ones that we do have. Freud paid a tremendous compliment to Nietzsche. Freud said that Nietzsche knew more about himself than any other human had ever known or was ever likely to know. Fairly smart guy I guess. Nietzsche was very bright. His main target was Christianity, and I am going to… now we are going to return to a more contemporary critique of Christianity. And I want… In this lecture I am going to present a little bit of Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity. And the reason I am going to do it and how it’s connected with my earlier remarks is to this very day, in spite of the so called secularisation of the world… values and especially in the United States… in our culture – and again we are working for a theory of the present – are still by and large Christian… by and large Christian values. Those are the official public ones, right. The official public values. Again, the gap between how they are practiced and what they are is all a matter of dispute. But this… Growing out of the discourse of Hegel there are other critiques, as I say, and Nietzsche’s is one. He focuses on the values that surround Christianity. So I am going to a talk about him a little bit more now, and then in the next lecture I want to talk about a Christian who has a criticism of modern Christianity. So you’ll get both sides. You’ll get one guy, who sort of, you’ll know before I am though here thinks Christianity was a… mistake. From the standpoint of the species it was a mistake. He goes… well not quite, you know, a two thousand year mistake? I mean, it was more than that. It was a little bit more catastrophic. Nietzsche thinks that among the other ill effects of Christianity, one of them is very banal. It’s the habit of bad reading. He explains how many of use are raised in churches where when we bother to read – now this won’t hold for many of our Jewish friends, or people who believe other religions – but in the Christian tradition we are taught to read the Old Testament where every stick of wood, every stone, every snake, every bird, every bat is a sign of Jesus. And Nietzsche points out that this inculcates in us habits of bad reading. It does. You know if you think about it, he [a preacher] says, “Well, you know in that book there…” then the preacher reads some just unintelligible piece of the Old Testament, you know, “The locusts have no king… and that means Jesus is coming”, and you go “Hmm, yeah, okay”. Nietzsche says this makes you not read well. [crowd laughter] Being brought up this way tends to make you not read well. It’s worse than that however, and that’s that what… the way Christianity presents itself is a doctrine of love and compassion. Certainly that has something to do with its appeal to our national character. And that’s good, to adopt a doctrine of love and compassion. Nietzsche’s concern in this book “On the Genealogy of Morals” is to show that what’s beneath that mask of love and compassion is really a doctrine of resentment and hatred. And I think I can make that come alive for you with some pretty banal examples. One would be Jerry Falwell, who discussed homosexuals. He loves them. How many people believe he really loves them? See I don’t. I think he hates them. His way of hating them is to love them. That’s the trick Nietzsche was after. The trick about how resentment, envy and hatred can be masked with these words: love and compassion. It’s an important argument today because I think we have become a suspicious culture. Nietzsche has been called one of the masters of suspicion. Paul Ricouer – the philosopher – called him a “master of suspicion”. Ricouer is a Christian as well, he just thinks that reading these books is the mediation through which any modern kind of faith would have to pass. You’d have to read them, understand them before you’d know what you meant by having faith. In any case Nietzsche sees this dynamic of resentment and envy as being, as it were, the unspoken, or the code beneath the code of Christianity. And so for the first time in the course I am going to pull out a section of a book that I want to look at, if I can find the correct quote here. This is from “On the Genealogy of Morals”. In this edition it is on page 48, it’s section 15 of the first essay. Nietzsche is discussing Christian love, as it were, and faith, and hope. Nietzsche in his rather cynical way says “In faith in what? In love of what? In hope of what? These weak people, some day or other they too intend to be strong”. Have you ever heard an evangelist and got that feeling? That while they were real meek, some day they intended to be real strong? That’s kind of… That’s the idea. “There is no doubt of that because they say their kingdom is coming. They term it ‘The Kingdom of God’ because after all, one should be so humble in all things. To experience that kind of duplicity one needs to live a long time. Dante, I think committed a crude blunder, when with a terror inspiring ingenuity he placed at the gateway of his hell the inscription ‘I too was created by eternal love’. At any rate, there would be more justification for placing above the gateway to the Christian paradise and its eternal bliss the inscription ‘I too was created by eternal hate’, provided a truth could be written above the gateway to a lie. What constitutes the bliss of this paradise?” Well Nietzsche goes on to quote, not Jerry Falwell but Saint Thomas Aquinas. Great teacher, saint, certainly knew more about Christianity than I do, or most of us. Thomas Aquinas says that “The blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned in order that their bliss be more delightful for them”. At that moment in Nietzsche’s text, something, sort of, creepy should come up on your back. You should go “Saint Thomas Aquinas said that in heaven, our chief bliss would be that we could see all those mean people that got us while we were alive. Having all of that stuff ripped off of them, eternally, forever”. And Nietzsche’s text wants to bring alive for us the barbarism, the hatred that must be buried in such a doctrine of love as its core. It’s a very frightening argument, but it isn’t limited – and I don’t want to limit it – to a set of Christian values specifically, but to certain duplicitous ways in which words of value are used in general. The way that a bomb can be dropped lovingly, surgically. See, when you cut someone in surgery you do it to heal them, right? That’s what a surgical strike is. That’s what a surgeon does, cuts the cancer out, leaves the patient alive. So… but that’s not all a surgical strike is, you see. This field within which good and bad appear so clearly to us – or is supposed to, I think some of us may be getting a little confused, but… – in which values are supposed to be so clearly… appear to us… may very well have these duplicities built within them. A surgical strike may not be like surgery with Dr Kildare. It could turn out there could be some resentment and hatred beneath it. There might be, it’s possible. Nietzsche is not trying to argue demonstratively, or to prove a syllogism, but rather to raise suspicions. To raise the kinds of suspicions that, as I say, I think many of us have when we look at the content of the values that have come up to us, you know, through our traditions. That’s what Nietzsche is powerfully and importantly good for. Not to deny – again, not to say “All is relative” – but to try to remind us of something of the origins of what we call “good” and “bad”, “right” and “wrong” and so on. By the way, these values have come out in other contexts. I remember in an earlier war General Westmoreland saying “We had to destroy the village in order to save it”. But it was not an irony. He meant it. I mean, so did the early Christian communities that settled into this country mean it. That for a witches own good one had to dunk her repeatedly in water. Now we have come a long way since then haven’t we, because now we lock people away in prisons and in institutions, torment them with drugs, lock them up in the most dangerous environments, have more people in prison in this country per capita than any country in the world except South Africa. I don’t know, they may be… the new South Africa may be ahead of us, who knows. But we haven’t gotten as far ahead in this regard as we think, and this argument has been updated by people like Michel Foucault. We still have… The idea that we would send someone to prison in order to rehabilitate them, now we are getting to be a little more honest about that. We are getting a little bit more barbaric, and for Nietzsche that would be better. That would be a little more honest. We are sending them to prison because we are scared of them and that we know if they go there really bad things will happen to them and it will ruin their lives and that will make us happy. That’s what we should say when we send one to prison – according to Nietzsche – if had to be honest. As Nietzsche said “In the name of minimal honesty”, don’t send them to prison and go “Oh, that was the best thing for them”. You know, you were spanked by your father, maybe once, and he just beat the hell out of you and he went, “That hurt me worse than it did you”, and you go “I guess…” [crowd laughter] Reading the text of Nietzsche makes us suspicious of people who do things for our own good. It makes us suspicious of people who “love” us – you know – in a kind of abstract way, especially. So I didn’t want you to think that I had sort of – with my previous lecture – sort of become soft hearted. So that’s why we followed up with the Nietzsche lectures [crowd laughter]. We don’t want any conservatives saying “Well, you are not tough minded enough”. So this is, sort of, a little bit more of the tough minded part. Just… a, sort of, a Christian doctrine of loving everyone, Nietzsche says does not work. Because love is meaningless without discrimination. In other words, in what way do I honour you, to love you, if I love everybody else too? See that’s… there are many points like that in Nietzsche that I think are quite challenging and quite interesting. It is absolutely, for Nietzsche, duplicitous to go “I just love everyone”. Well, you haven’t met everyone. [crowd laughter]. And some of them you are not going to like. [crowd laughter]. Because they are asses, and you are not going to like them. And if you did, the people you really loved ought to be irritated, because you’d say “Well, I thought you loved me, you love everybody? Well, big deal, I’ll see you later. I mean, you know, you bump into me again, you’ll still love me.”. You know, it’s like Will Rogers “I never met a man I didn’t like”, well he never met George Bush. [crowd laughter]. You know. So Nietzsche is a wonderful… and all I can do is… because his argument is intricate and powerful, I am just giving you suggestive bits of it today. But Nietzsche is one of the modern masters of suspicion, whose… the reading of whose books… I think warns us against some of our, as it were, not prejudices, because it’s not fair to call something a prejudice that’s so deeply seated, you know, that is so much a part of our civilisation and culture. It’s not really a prejudice, but it is an eye opening experience to get, as it were, another look at it. A look at what might be beneath it. And so, to get ready for my remarks on Nietzsche today it was simply enough, as I say, to switch around… the TV… not enough, I mean I, unfortunately I had to read this stuff before, and all this. Probably when I was too young. Let’s switch around and hear Oral Roberts discuss how much he loved everybody out in TV land and that ten big enemies were coming after all of us. You know, he didn’t name any of them so it’s not very helpful. [crowd laughter]. I mean if you knew who they were you could call the cops or something I guess. Those are “peace” officers. They carry weapons. Like patriot missiles, peace keepers. But to hear Oral and the various morning preachers… and of course in the case of Falwell, I think it’s just outstanding, because Falwell always loves his enemies. And the duplicity in it is palpable, and I just think that someone would have to be incredibly naive not to feel it almost. Especially if you have seen him in debate with some leader of, for example, a homosexual group, and he just goes: “I love you”. You just know that somewhere in there is the desire to inter everyone. [crowd laughter] More importantly, in the very texts that form the Christian tradition, like Thomas Aquinas are these frightening moments that look marginal to the main tradition but I don’t think anyone is going to raise their hand and tell me Saint Thomas Aquinas is a marginal figure in the history of Christianity. These blinding moments of clarity where we have these people say “The chief pleasure will be to see the torments of the damned”. I mean, why will heaven be a lot of fun? Well we will be there a long time and it will be like a Clive Barker movie. All the people we didn’t like will be being torn apart, you know, like in one of those Clive Barker films and that will be a lot of fun. It will be an ongoing splatter movie mixed with harp music. [crowd laughter]. It will be a real gig – a trip – it will be fun! Well anyway. Nietzsche’s discourse would teach us to be a little more honest about this, I think. And when we intend to punish or kill people, it would be nice to say that we intend to punish or kill them. By nice I mean not moral, we are in this moral universe where duplicity is built into being virtuous. Still, you see how I said earlier for the Greeks telling lies well is sort of openly acknowledged as something clever to do, but that duplicity is still built into the concept of virtue in a way. I mean we can’t really tell the truth even about wars, as you know. We can’t really let it all hang out and say “Well you know we started off… just invade Kuwait and get it back, but now we are really pissed, and we want to kill all those damn Arabs, every one of them and that damn Saddam, and any of those other people who are yelling and burning our flag too”. Well, I have been out and around the country, and that’s the attitude out there. It’s not… it’s funny, sort of the lower you go down the educational scale the more honest it gets. It’s kind of… that’s sort of nice. At the university we have a lot of professors who believe the same thing who just won’t say it that way. They believe it, they just won’t say it. Instead they’ll do a sort of a General Haig kind of discussion of it. The way Al Haig talks, sort of in state department- ese, full of lots of “ing” words and coinages that are not found in the English language that, you know, just cover over the real situation, when what Al Hague really wants to say is “I am in charge and the dark little people will die”. [crowd laughter]. That’s the message. And it’s right and good that they should die, because they will die so that everyone can be free in the New World Order, and right on let’s go get ’em; kick butt, drop bombs, they die, don’t talk, kill. So like… it’s like a proposal for surrender… a proposal for surrender as follows. “You surrender or we bomb you while you sit there, but of course if you get up to leave we will bomb you while you are walking away.”. Is that a good policy? See that’s almost Nietzschean, isn’t it? Surrender, but don’t move. Of course, if you don’t move, you won’t have surrendered, so we’ll have to bomb you, but if you move we won’t be sure you have surrendered so we’ll have to bomb you. So surrender, but we’ll bomb you is kind of a policy designed to do what? Bomb people! They can go, “Don’t…”, but it won’t help, because they will have to be either still or moving, or some condition in between. Again, it would be better openly to say “Now that we have got this thing going we are all good Christians who want to do the right thing and we are all believers in good Democracy, but for the moment, let’s forget it. This is too much fun. Let’s really hammer them. And let’s prove that our version of the Peloponnesian War, the one that made the Greeks so confused about their values…” In our culture, we had a war like that, that confused us about our values – Vietnam – and it seems kind of a background theme of the current war, of a philosophy of the present to which I am now connecting the discourse of Nietzsche, loosely. A target might be to kill the guilt and the fear that were produced by that other troubling moment in history. Nothing would do that better than a clean kill with a huge majority for it. A quick clean kill. What better basis on which to build a New World Order, than an order of barbarism… I mean, you know… than this massively quick and effective barbarism which would accomplish what should be openly stated as a public goal of the war. Namely, to prove that the peace love hippies were wrong and Rambo right, and that is in that earlier war, if only we had just kept bombing and hitting them with everything we had, those damn peaceniks and those newspaper guys and all those bleeding hearts wouldn’t have lost the war for us. Well if we can go in now and show that massive force continually applied will bring this country to its knees, it will be a way to demonstrate that that could have been done before. That all those people that raised all that hell were even more wrong than they have already admitted. Good God, even more sold out than they were already sold. It’s like the New World Order can’t tolerate even a little, just a little bit of opposition. And that may be true of it because it is, I don’t know if it’s Nietzsche’s view but it’s mine, that systems of power connected to systems of value tend to spread and become total. In other words, they tend to want to fill up the total field of discourse within which we discuss the moral. This is well known about religions… as we, I mean… it helps to account for religious wars. The principle of toleration is not built into people who have that kind of insight into the truth. That’s why I wanted to begin – I did begin these lectures – by discussing fallibilism, not as some deep philosophical principle, but as the following principle. That it’s okay to have beliefs, but suspect your own beliefs. That it’s important to believe some things passionately, but it’s also important to have the wisdom to know that you could be dead wrong. So, using Nietzsche to bring up this critique of some of the values that have come out of the so called “Christian tradition”, I realise that I could be wrong, Nietzsche could be wrong. But all these arguments – and from him, and the suggestions I have made during this hour – are meant to do are to suggest a kind of suspicion of that tradition. Now, Nietzsche does say what is the powerful… one of the powerful motivations behind Christianity. Which is – I have argued – is deeply connected to the current world system. One of its powerful motivations is it does speak to something that’s very important, and human beings may in fact quite generally share it. And that’s the need for love. Christianity is sort of a lyrical religion in that respect, it speaks of love. And it’s hard not to know that it fudges the distinction between the earthly and the carnal kind. It fudges that distinction. I don’t know how many of you have ever been to an evangelical meeting out in the country, but that’s the night when all the men and women get dressed up in their best clothes and go and sing these rousing songs and sweat in their best perfume and sing “Love lifted me”, and it’s very difficult not to see Nietzsche’s point. That Christianity has always been a find for those who have repressed sexuality. [crowd laughter]. It’s quite a find, it always has been. So all I can do is suggest you read more Nietzsche. In a cynical time like this it is hardly necessary, most of you are probably that cynical already anyway, maybe this was a waste of time. But I wanted to add to the economic and political conditions what might be called “cultural conditions”, of which religion remains an important one and so the discussion of Nietzsche fits there, and also it fits because it’s still a project for some, and a quite serious one. So now that I have presented Nietzsche’s rather cynical view, in the next one I will discuss Kierkegaard’s view, but the problem with this is that Christianity – as I have already argued – in a modern society is already a very… idiosyncratic project. Very idiosyncratic. I know that because I have been a faculty in residence and lived with students at a university and had them come in and complain “My roommate is a real sky pilot”, by which they mean he reads the bible a lot and irritates them. And it… that’s an easier way to get rid of a roommate than coming in and saying he is a Nazi, because the Nazi will just put up some swastikas in the room and use some words you don’t like, the other guy will be up praying and irritating you all night. [crowd laughter]. But Christianity I have been discussing here is not Christianity in the intimate sense of faith that I will discuss when I do briefly discuss Kierkegaard, another critic of modern times. But that Christianity that has become a public religion about which I guess the briefest Nietzsche critique would be that it’s open, as a public religion. In his appointment to politics Harry Truman I think is quoted as saying that in our system, to run for political office you have got to pour God and Jesus all over everything like ketchup over your food. It’s just got to be covered up in it. Now Carter was a different story. Someone said I had to say something about Jimmy Carter, in any course on ethics you have got to talk about Jimmy Carter. And all I can say about Jimmy is that he is a good Christian, but he did admit that he lusted in his heart after other women. If he had courage enough, he would have been Ted Kennedy. [crowd laughter]. And if Ted Kennedy had the courage of Nietzsche, he would have said “Yeah I did it and I liked it and you would have too if you had been there” [crowd laughter], which is probably true! Don’t you see I am not really trying to be cynical here, it’s probably right! Nietzsche isn’t trying to be just cynical to irritate you folks, I mean that’s probably right. Yes, you know, if you are rich, good looking, lots of people… yeah sure why not! So there’s like a distinction there, there’s sort of Kennedy… Carter… and then wayyy down at the end of the spectrum is Richard Nixon. Is it almost question time, I really don’t know what other nasty things to say about folks. [crowd laughter].
Kierkegaard and the Contemporary Spirit (1990)
Transcript: Okay, last time I may have dropped out of my West Texas mode for a moment and become a little too philosophical, so I am going to try to restate a few things from Nietzsche in a simple way, quickly, before I move on to some remarks about Kierkegaard. What I was trying to evoke in you was more the spirit of Nietzsche than the specific text. The spirit of Nietzsche is one of deep suspicion, and that suspicion is that power is intertwined with things that we normally like to think of, even today, as not being dependent on power, for example: truth, goodness, and so on. Nietzsche says they are. Now Nietzsche says… and he uses historical models. Since we have already made remarks that real history is material and philosophers generally use sort of idiographic and very brief descriptions of historical periods, mainly to make points about them. Whether the Greeks were really like that is another issue. A very troubling and problematic issue. But for Nietzsche the Greeks had a kind of straightforward idea of virtue based on Excellence, which I discussed in the very first lecture on Socrates. Excellence was to fulfil your human powers, so that among those would be that if you had desires, the ability to meet them was quite important to being excellent. Excellent people wouldn’t be filled with resentment and envy because mostly when they tried to exercise a human power they would be able to meet their need. Now, for Nietzsche, the Christian morality that grew out of a slave context. And this is not meant to be a criticism of the slaves. And the only sense in which I used it as a criticism of Christianity was as Christianity as a public religion, and I… there’s where I made my political points. But the slave aspect of Christianity meant that its doctrines of love and compassion were rooted in the resentment of a power that could not exercise itself. One of the things slaves have a problem with is that they have powers too, but are constrained from exercising them. Christianity therefore – on Nietzsche’s account – part of its function was compensatory. To compensate for that power you don’t have in this one… in this world, by projecting a power in another one. By loving people in this world, but the thematic underneath it – the thematic underneath it, its motivation – that’s what Nietzsche argued was resentment, hatred and so on. That made it all the more important to cloak those motives in a dialogue of love. Just as one has a political doctrine of greed, best to cloak it in a political language of freedom and choice. Greed doesn’t sell as well as freedom, choice and points of light. So that’s my quick recap of Nietzsche. He’s to make us suspicious even about what people think they really believe. That was another point. On the other side of resentment however, is religion as resistance. So I have had some very helpful questions on that, and religion also serves this function… and now I am referring back to some famous remarks of Karl Marx’s about religion not only stupefies… that’s the remark about religion being the opium of the people. Marx didn’t live long enough to know that today opium is the opium of the people. [crowd laughter]. We are materialists now, like him. Today, you got a whole bunch of dissatisfied people, their opium is opium. It’s more effective as opium, real opium is. It’s really opium. But religion had this dual significance. That while resentment was there, there was also resistance, and rebellion. In other words, it was a form of resistance to power and therefore itself a… what? A power. So that’s where Nietzsche’s account becomes complicated in regard to power. But what – if anything – is shocking about Nietzsche, it’s to look at these doctrines that are considered; about the holy, the good, the true, the right and the virtuous, and analyse them in terms of power. So that’s a brief recap of what I have said about Nietzsche. I was also asked to explain – and I guess you always are – Nietzsche’s famous remark. He was not the first to make it. Hegel was the first to make the remark “God is dead” in a certain context. But Nietzsche is best known for saying “God is dead”, and my way of treating that is not like other philosophers. I took Nietzsche to be making something like a sociological point. A point about society. Nietzsche is trying to tell us something – and this is to go back to remarks I made earlier too – about the condition of the modern world, where our lives are fragmented into a work week, and then a festival day called “Saturday”. Well that’s if you’re not doing the work left over from the week, or you don’t have the neighbours over, when it just becomes more work. No, you may like your neighbours, I don’t know. But anyway, the work week, and Sunday as a sort of separate segmented day set off for religion, when in Nietzsche’s view and mine and according to, as it were, the guiding principles of the religious way of life itself, could not by the very nature of the case be religion. So the remark that God is dead is a remark about how society has changed. Nietzsche in his famous parable where he discusses this said that you and I have killed him… “God is dead and you and I have killed him”. In other words, we have ceased to live a life centred around God. And he makes a shocking and I think brilliant remark when he says “What are these churches today if they are not the tombs and the sepulchres of God. They give the best evidence to his death. These churches, these creeds, what are they but his tombs”. So Nietzsche’s remark is about a culture that can’t truly be centred in the… religious holy way of life anymore. Not that there aren’t any more believers that really believe – okay, it’s not that – but that the culture has segmented into one facet of life something that by its very nature should permeate the whole of life. Because if there is a God, it clearly would permeate the whole of our lives, be the point of them. And that’s the sense in which that God at the centre of the world is dead, and what’s in his place are other world systems. Economic, political, and I discussed those too. So that for me is the meaning to the remark “God is dead”. Of course at one level it’s a paradox, because if you were an atheist you would think it was a strange remark, because what sense does it make to say something died that never was there in the first place. So that’s why I take it to be a historical/sociological style remark… is because God and/or gods are imminent, inside – as it were – cultures, tribes and so on, not somewhere above them and outside of them. So Nietzsche’s remark is that in our tribe that myth has lost its power to bind us all. Now, many modern conservatives wish we had it back. Daniel Bell argues that an answer to America’s problems is a rebirth of religion, but almost everything counts against that in a society divided. Where labour is divided the way ours is, and where the first thing that would happen if we had a rebirth of it would be experts in it, specialists, and new TV shows about it. Which is where we get onto Kierkegaard and his brilliant attempt to try to save more than Christianity as a personal, singular relation with something else, about which Kierkegaard won’t say much. But what he calls… what I will call his attack on Christendom, and it’s not so different than Nietzsche’s. Kierkegaard is the author of a famous remark, and he says “In a country – or in a place – where all are Christians, ipso facto none are Christians”. He reminds us that the Gospel – the challenging Gospel – that arguably someone like Martin Luther King took probably too seriously, not in my view, but in the view of some, that arguably there it would be dangerous to be a Christian. But we all know today to be a Christian – a famous Christian – like Billy Graham doesn’t mean you have the task of Moses which is to lead your people out of bondage. It means you have the job of playing golf with the Pharaoh, you know. I mean… that’s a different function of religion, right? To play golf with the Pharaoh isn’t the same thing as leading your people out of bondage. So, religion in that sense is just a bullwort for the status quo. You know, it’s praying for the troops, praying for victory and so on. Kierkegaard was a brilliant critic of this use of religion. And he is a philosopher that someone I studied with – Louis Mackey, a very brilliant man – is an expert on. And he used to advise young students who are on their way to the seminary not to take his course. Because he said even though Kierkegaard is the most sophisticated modern defender of Christianity, it would be very counter-productive for your career as a minister to study Kierkegaard with me. So by all means, avoid my course. Take a course in Marx, Nietzsche, anybody, but don’t take Kierkegaard because in a way from the inside he makes the point, in a way. One of my favourite books, and its one where I may drain some of the Christianity out of it as I build the case that Kierkegaard makes about what “human subjects” are, to return to our topic of “human values”. I don’t think we have left it far. But to return to our topic of human values, Kierkegaard wants to build a case in a very famous book and I’ll talk about it next. And it is another reaction against accepting Hegel’s, sort of, conservative thesis that the world kind of came to an end with modern life; the bureaucratic state, the capitalist economy. Kierkegaard is a critic of that and he’s a critic of a fundamental notion to it which is that each one of us are individual subjects somehow separated from each other, almost like monads, individuals. A concept that might be criticised in a West Texas way by saying “Rugged individualism leads to ragged individuals”. So, a more sophisticated version I’ll give you in Kierkegaard of that, and remind you that we are talking here about one of the most sophisticated defenders of Christianity, so that you’ll see that I am going to try to be balanced, tolerant, liberal and fair, and give both versions. The book I have in mind is “The Sickness Unto Death” by Soren Kierkegaard. A very… as you can see, you are in for the happy part of the course now [crowd laughter]. “The Sickness Unto Death”, which by the way, with Kierkegaard you have to be on guard for irony all the time. Underneath – the sub heading – is “A Christian psychological exposition for upbuilding and awakening”. None of that is going to happen in this book. [crowd laughter]. In fact, the odd thing about “The Sickness Unto Death” – and I am going to discuss this book because I find it just a fascinating and wonderful book – it’s shocking and it does hit a part of us that I mentioned before when I discussed our search for meaning in modern conditions, how difficult it is, and a fragmented life shaped by work and other imperatives. Kierkegaard in this book is going to argue not for psychology, but about why psychology is in principle impossible. In other words – to make the argument banally – it’s about why psychologists won’t do you any good unless they give you medicine. If they can give you medicine it will knock out a lot of your human worries, but other than that there is a deep problem, and it’s because the psyche itself is a problem. So, now someone said to me they didn’t understand very much of my last lecture. We are going to read you the densest passage that I know of in all of philosophy that opens Kierkegaard’s book. And I have got to remind you before I read it that it’s a bit of a joke because it’s a parody of Hegel’s language, but beneath the parody is an important joke about what we are as subjects. So let me start with that, and… don’t ask me after I read this what it means [crowd laughter]. I mean I’ll have a little bit to say about it, but it’s just… It’s written beautifully and we’ll do this part and, [flicks through pages], and then we’ll move on. Okay. “Despair is the sickness unto death”. That’s section A. You may have wondered what it was, it’s despair. A condition we don’t have anymore so we don’t need to worry about it. Well actually, this book will argue that despair is not a mood or a psychological state. It’s not either one of those. I’ll get around to what else it is, for Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard begins this way. “A human being is spirit”, now this is the language that some of you were making fun of. I like it, it’s ironic and fun. “A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation. Now the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way, a human being is not a self.” That’s a long joke. See, that shows you that philosophers don’t have to share a sense of humour with everyone else, right. [crowd laughter]. No, the long joke that’s hidden in that passage is that the self is not a substantial thing but a deep relation, and it’s not even that relation but the relating of a relation. Now let me try to explain what Kierkegaard is driving at. We are constituted in that paradoxical condition where we can do two of the things that we have tried to do throughout these lectures: think in a quasi-utopian way, about projecting from everyday life about what the world might be like, and even think about things as immense as infinity, and on the other hand be absolutely stuck in the finite banal conditioned world of everyday life. So we are a synthesis between those. We are a synthesis between our desire for freedom and our recognition of brutal necessity. But because we are a relation, we are incomplete. The self – and here he agrees with David Hume and others – is not yet a self. Now, this is not a mood problem. A psychologist can’t fix it because this despair that Kierkegaard analyses in this book constitutes the self. The self is this despairing relation. You can’t be cured of it. You are it. You can’t go to the psychologist and go “I am in despair, fix it” in this sense, because that would be to obliterate your self that’s built in this despairing relation. Now, despair, you’re going to go “That’s too big a word, I am not in despair that much”. Still not thinking along the lines of Kierkegaard’s argument, because there are various forms of despair. I’ll quickly lay them out. I like the despair part, because everybody’s too happy at this point in the course. There is despair that… takes the form of not being conscious of having a self. That’s very common today, I would argue. Despair in just not being conscious that you have a self, that there is this integrated narrative called your life, but more or less just being telematically conscious, if I may contrast it with another form of consciousness. Scene by scene like “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd“, scene by scene by scene by scene by scene by scene, but no connecting narrative, no connecting thread to the story. Not being conscious of having a self, that’s despair. That’s the despair that fills you with emptiness when you go “Well what does my life mean?” and there is not a narrative to fit it into. That may not even occur to you. If you are that telematically conscious, it may never occur to you. Some people die a real death never having been alive. That’s why zombie movies scare us, you know, been to a mall, seen a zombie movie, you should be scared. You don’t know how many people will die that never took the gamble to try to live. But despair would be… simple if only people were in despair who were not conscious of having a self. You can also be in despair… and in fact I will skip one of the other forms, because this is one that’s probably most common and where Kierkegaard opens up the biggest problems with our ordinary understanding of what we are as psychological beings. Which is to add another level to our account of our material conditions as humans, and that’s the despair that is unaware that it is despair. Now well, you are all going to go “Well, that’s unfair, that’s philosophical, that’s unfair”. No. Kierkegaard says that’s the incurable kind. The incurable kind is the despair that is unaware that it is despair. Now the reason that one’s incurable is you haven’t got the crisis. A crisis will make you face despair, but it won’t cure it. You will know more about what you are as a self. The kind of despair that is unaware that it is despair. That’s… hopeless. There is no way around that. Now, when he calls it “The sickness unto death”, that too is a kind of irony. Because it’s a joke in a way, because there is not the least possibility that anyone will actually die from despair. They may dress in black and go to Bergman movies or whatever, but there is not a real chance you’ll die from it. It won’t really kill you. It’s not that kind of death. That kind of death would be wished for in a dialectic, or dialogue, like Kierkegaard’s. Real despair of the Kierkegaardian kind is characterised over here as follows. Kierkegaard says “Literally speaking, there is not the slightest possibility that anyone will die from this sickness or that it will end in physical death”. You may notice that Woody Allen, you know, constantly despairs and frets, but it really means he is just a hypochondriac, he’s not going to die from despair, but I have made that point. “On the contrary, the torment of despair is precisely this inability to die”. This is not an argument for suicide, it’s even worse than that. Suicide won’t help either, for Hamlet’s kind of reasons. “Thus it has more in common with the situation of a mortally ill person who lies struggling with death and yet cannot die. Thus to be sick unto death is to be unable to die, and yet not as if there was hope for life, but when we learn to know the even greater danger, we hope for death. When the danger is so great that death becomes the hope, then despair is the hopelessness of not even being able to die”. Now, the only reason that I have taken us this far into Kierkegaard, a brilliant Christian… for him, a paradoxical answer to this is a relation with Christ, which he admits is absurd. You can read more of him and decide if you want to believe something absurd. He admits it, he’s a joker about it. I wanted to try to lead it back into social theory, because I think that it is arguable that subjects, selves, human beings – about whose values we have been discussing, philosophising – may very well be that the human situation today is one of that despair in that sense. And I am going to use some very modern and seemingly off the topic examples of what I mean by that. Seemingly off the topic. I am going to try to use two genre of horror movies to explain the difference. Does anybody remember the old B horror movies, or even the, sort of, Freddy… the 13th… The big danger in them is that you will die. I mean that’s what everybody is trying to avoid, and that’s what generates the fear. But that is not the fear generated in the new near fiction science fiction like Blade Runner. In Blade Runner, the greatest hope is to be able to die. You know they won’t let you. They will cybernetically make sure that you’ll be around. They will record your image and save it, shoot it to rockets in space, and the desire to be obliterated, to die a concrete death, becomes an almost utopian hope. Now, you are going “Oh, you are crazy Rick, that’s too… I don’t understand it, it’s too weird”, it isn’t! Why do you think apocalypse movies are popular? Because they are scary? Uh-uh. Mad Max is exciting because compared to the boredom, the banality and the despair of everyday life, in this kind of society, what could be more exciting that an apocalypse and fast stripped down cars, shoot Mad Max across the desert and a return to… it’s not that the apocalypse horrifies us at all. Now by the apocalypse I am not speaking biblically. We have technologically achieved the ability to create it long ago. Don’t worry about the atom bomb in that sense. It’s old fashioned technology by now. You know, it’s well within the reach now, as we know, of… peripheral countries can build them. We are scared of that, but it’s old fashioned technology. Apocalypse movies create in the audience… and it’s pretty easy to see when you go into them with younger people who are less ashamed to show their emotions. When the big boom goes off, that’s great, it wipes the slate clean and now we can start the movie. Here’s Mad Max and these people running around and the desire for death is the greatest hope here. That’s not… these kids are not going to die from it. But it is… that desire is even a source of pleasure and joy. Another movie that I can mention – now maybe many of you haven’t seen it – is Heathers, which marks this same movement into a society of… where despair is this kind of condition, this structural thing. In Heathers, the young juvenile delinquent who they make fun of by calling him J.D., which could stand for James Dean, or juvenile delinquent, is a rather uninteresting young man who is planning a Woodstock for the 90’s. Namely, to get everybody in the high school to sign a collective suicide note – that they are not aware of, he has put another little thing over it – and then blow up the high school and kill everyone in it. That will be the Woodstock of the 90’s. Now, young audiences go, and according to feedback to me – I receive about this movie – is that this is a perfectly acceptable new James Dean. He says at one point in the film… “Why am I not a rebel?”. One of the women in the film says “You are a psychotic”, and he goes “Well you say tomato, I say tomato“, I mean, who is to say? Well, the thematics of presenting that possibility – an apocalyptic one – as a hopeful one, only can be hopeful if structurally there is a greater danger than even dying. At least in an apocalypse everyone would die, and you would see other people and you would be one of them, and there would be the real embodied feel of it. But… to be in a situation where you were unable to die, but trapped in this cycle of despair which Kierkegaard talks about, which to refer back to Marx, Weber and others may be no more or less than just the cycle of our boring daily existence without projects beyond these limited ones I have named: getting a boat, getting some new shoes, resoling the Reeboks, getting the kids in the “right” school. Under such conditions moments may arise, Kierkegaard argues, in which – when we really face ourselves – the hope would be to find a way to die. It doesn’t mean you couldn’t commit suicide, but that wouldn’t even solve it. You would be too worried. You would say “What will the kids do after I am gone?”. See that wouldn’t solve it either, because what has structured you is this despair. It is you. That’s again why, you have a lot of therapists, but they can’t fix this Kierkegaardian problem. It is not a mere psychological problem, it is a structural condition of the self. My argument here is that under our modern conditions, it is quite general. So, apocalypse movies – on this kind of account – will give us a social compensation for this inability, for this despair. Now they will also give us a thrill. Things could be otherwise, there could be the big bomb after all. I mean, it’s joked about. It should be. In a way… it’s one way to express this very despair. It’s joked about. The more frightening movies, as I say, are movies like Blade Runner. Where a very near future is presented in which you, like all other commodities, will be recycled. Where that is the greater danger – not to die a death in despair – but to live a life that’s not human. The real danger is one that is summarised beautifully by a theologian friend of mine at Duke. The old problem of Theology, which has always been closely connected to Philosophy, as you may know. The old problem was the unbeliever; the non-believer. The new problem is the non- person. This Kierkegaard had already foresaw… you know, had a foretaste of. It isn’t the problem of people not believing, it’s the problem of finding people. Are there people? Do we want to call these beings that are walking around “people”? And that isn’t… can’t… and I don’t want to make this sound elitist. That can’t be said from a standpoint separate from you being one of them. You know, raised in the same televised culture, where the simulated images of the “real” are just as “real” as real, and sometimes more “real” than real. I mean, it is not a problem about which one can be an elitist in any sense, because it is quite generally a social malady, in much the [same] way as the massive support for the war now could be understood as some social malady of a certain kind, like shellshock; the reaction of people struggling to be sane in insane conditions. Despair is a reaction of people struggling to be human in inhuman conditions. But the answer to this is not to… all a psychologist can do if you go to them… I mean, it’s not “all”. It’s a pretty good thing. You don’t want to worry about this kind of thing; “despair”, losing your humanity. There are drugs. And I am not talking now about the “just say no” kind. Those are, as we know, for the lower classes. There are middle class drugs that can be prescribed to you legally that, as it were, handle these existential worries. Valium is one. In Don DeLillo’s novel, Dilor is an even better version. Totally kills the fear of death, just pop one pill and it just shuts off the electrochemical things that make you despair, fear death, have anxiety. Valium, already I think is… well, it’s been replaced though by a whole series now, right, of designer tranquilisers. I mean, it’s still the major general one. But now there are designer tranquilisers. Well there is a point here, and a very deep one. We have been tracing throughout here a series of human projects, and yet we have not yet faced the greatest danger: that if the story of the development of society in the late 19th Century in its broadest sense was the replacement of manual labour by machine labour in the advancing countries of the world, the story of the 20th Century will surely be in part, and in broad strokes, the replacement of intellectual labour – thinking, and even feeling and emoting – by machine labour. How much of that has already occurred? I am not up here to spin a science fiction story for you. Well, we already have near future movies that project cyborgs and stuff, but we also have actually technically built virtual reality suits, we have hosts of designer drugs, we have TV and movie stars that redesign their bodies, that redesign their iconic images, that come out with a different kind of soul. For example, Michael Jackson. We couldn’t decide whether he was Diana Ross – you know at one time he kinda looked like Diana Ross – one of the young Jacksons, a motown singer, or a Walt Disney star, because he is rewhittled, reshaped. Now in terms of this whole discourse we have had about what humans are and their values as they develop historically, probably the greatest danger in the final situation that might be faced, is what’s left of the human at all under modern conditions. What is left to talk about in this dimension? And in that situation you have to face squarely this problem that Kierkegaard – I have to say with some nostalgia – called “despair”, because it’s just as common today to find people who are giddy over the current situation. I mean really, they write books called “The Ecstasy of Communication“, about how much more… how wonderful it is to be an image rather than a person. In that regard… let me try to make this… get back to a West Texas level with this so you can follow me. For Reagan, it was so much more convenient to be an image than a person. A real person like him is kind of a drag, semi-good actor… semi-good, he was good in that one movie where they cut off his legs… [crowd laughter]. Made him shorter for one thing. Magnificent as an icon. Great TV icon, which was his function. You know, and I know, that he couldn’t run a government. That’s not debatable. Just like a cabbage can’t drive a BMW, we don’t debate issues like that. [crowd laughter]. What was important about him was his iconic significance. It was more real than real. See, FDR was a real president. You know… real. You know, FDR. There were sort of all these embodied things about him, you know, the wheelchair, tied down… could sort of feel the real about him. With Reagan, his telematic image was sort of more real than even real. Sort of transcends even our notions of limited reality because, well, here’s a famous Hollywood phrase: “Larger than life”. That’s what we say about screen figures. He was larger than life. By which I suppose we mean he was dead. And in a sense, it was totally irrelevant. Because as long as the images kept flowing and some other hack actor could dress up like him to show up and wave under the knowledge… under the noise of the helicopters, it mattered not! In a society – and this is the point I am making – in a society where images count to that extent, what it means to be a subject… what it means to try to find a project… gets to be re-understood in terms of what it means to find the right place to buy the clothes, the best place to go to school, the right kind of accent to use, and who to get to know. It becomes a matter of fashion. For Kierkegaard, that was rather despairing. He thought that humans driven to such an extent – driven to that extent of socialisation; hyper-socialisation – would greatly prefer death, but would pretty much unable to pull the thing off. Just like the young man in Heathers doesn’t quite get around to blowing up the high school, and the young audience is very disappointed that he doesn’t! Everyone that I talked to who saw the film, all the young people went “Well it would have been so much better if he had blown it up! I mean, we did want a Woodstock for the 90’s. It would have been real, I mean, send a message to the whole country”. Well, this is where we reach a sort of limit on what we can do in terms of either social theory or human values, and that’s where we begin to discuss the possible disappearance of the subject of that discourse: the human. And if human beings were constituted in what they physically did and what they thought – which seemed to be what we were talking about for most of the course, right? – then if in the nineteenth century we began to replace physical labour with machine labour, and now every home has a PC that’s smarter than any of us used to be! When mental labour becomes replaced, what functions are left over for humans to perform becomes really problematic. It becomes really problematic. Now, the despairing way to look at it is that we have become useless, however that is only in the scale of values I have been criticising. In other words, we would become useless in the sense that they don’t need our labour. That’s the scale of value I have been criticising. And I think part of the giddiness of this situation within which the need for humans to do certain things is becoming erased in society through the advance of capitalism; technology, if you want to put in a cheap way. The other side of that is the giddiness of the possibility of freedom. I mean after all, freed from manual labour doesn’t sound so bad, freed from mental labour doesn’t sound so bad, especially given the boring kinds computers do! You know, computers do a lot of bookkeeping and a lot of numbers stuff, and who in the hell likes that! Well, I mean, you know, there may be someone who does, but they can still do it as a hobby, you know. If they have got to keep some books, they can still do it! But the other side of this social system, which seems as it were to squash out what was understood as human values. And I mean now in the broadest sense, insofar as humans thought… something, did… something… begins to squash that out. The other side of it is the need for the necessity of some of these things disappears and leaves open possible projects of freedom again, but at another level now. What those would look like – what they would be like – would be much different. They can’t really be talked about. Just like the social situation I am trying to describe is difficult to evoke, because we are in the middle of it. You know, it’s always hard to evoke the present because you’re in it. It’s kind of like the aquarium fish trying to describe the aquarium. I mean, it’s home, you know, “Here I am, there’s a [mumbles, pretends to be a fish]”. But what we would need, and what we cannot have, in my view, is a view from outside the aquarium, sort of looking at it, where its limits are, and its boundaries. In this situation, the one I am describing now, and trying to connect up now as the third part of my social account, and the scariest probably for me, is the culture that – many of you have heard this word – the culture which is postmodern… I think we have a very modernist economy still, a very modernist State, but when we hear the phrase “postmodern culture”, one of its reference is a culture based on spectacles and images that have become more real than the real thing. Where Madonna is more real than your real lover. Where the real thing is not God, but Coca-Cola. Coke is it. You know, IT… That’s a strong claim. [crowd laughter]. “It”. What do you get to be more than that? It. It’s almost like a Hindu religion. You know, this is the cultural aspect of society, and culture is very important because it’s where we draw our meanings from, and our identities. It’s in a culture that we learn how to speak a language, what our identities are. In a totally commodified culture – I have mentioned, you know, phone sex and that sort of thing – in a totally commodified culture, it’s hard to decide whether you have just adopted a fashion, or you are developing as a person. In fact, how you could argue between the two becomes very difficult in a culture like ours. Does it mean more than you now jog and do diet pills. Does it mean something more? It becomes difficult to say what more that is. That attempt to articulate meaning finds all these bizarre outlets. Shirley MacLaine chakras, I mean people watch that on TV without just bursting – not in laughter – but in either laughter or tears, because when you are driven to that extreme to find some meaning, then your condition is a sickness unto death… if you are driven to that extreme to find meaning. When the only warmth you can get is to cuddle up by a flag that you are all too cynical to really believe in. It’s long gone and we all know it. The new patriotism is a cynical one, in a way. We know better now, but we just have to forget that we know better. When that’s your comfort… is to go into that… as a kind of new lifestyle, sort of like yuppy-ism is over and greed… there must be something to give meaning… oh there is! I forgot about the flag. Well, what’s next? Well maybe baseball. We’ll have a… you know, they made a bunch of baseball movies, maybe everybody will get back into baseball. The point here is that what these things are don’t look like human choices or human values anymore, but human commodities; things you can buy, you know. I mean you can’t walk in a 7- Eleven without being able to buy a piece of identity. We all know that when you put on a hat that says “Lonestar Beer”, you’ve bought a kind of identity. But no less so than when you show up at Harvard in your little wool sweater. They code certain kinds of identities, and the fear is that beneath them, what we have understood and discussed in here as “human values” have been, as it were, dried up by the very ability to market them. By the ability to turn them into goods for sale, and worse than that, into images, and into cultural products of each one of has the trouble of saying, you know, as I say, why we are not one. How could I not be aware of this as we film this, right? Because I have no control over the image production, in a certain sense, and even the people who film and so on… it goes beyond that. We are in a telematic world in that sense, where you could have a revolution in Beijing, have the pictures over here in two minutes, and then forget about it in a month, and three months later have one of the people on The Phil Donahue Show. That kind of society produces different kinds of people. The question is whether we still want to call them that or not. At a certain point, we don’t! I don’t, anyway. This is my view… where they reach… I call it the “D.Q. threshold”; the Dan Quayle threshold. Beneath that I cease to give an analysis of human values or of the subject. Beneath that threshold, I am dealing with what Descartes called “cleverly constructed automatons”, dealing with people without affect. In other words, they can fake affect. They can pretend to be moved, but can’t be moved. You know, where being moved was an inner relation. I’ll try another example to evoke this postmodern scene that I will discuss again in the next lecture, not using Kierkegaard, but using a little Freud, but what the hell, it’s something. Measure the distance this way. Try to measure the distance between Wuthering Heights and the interior of reading that novel, Wuthering Heights. You know, that’s a love story, I mean it’s really a love story because it’s scary and crazy and embodied like love, its nuts. You know, the guy loves the woman so much, he’ll follow her forever and drive her crazy, even into hell if she dies. You know, it’s just a… It’s a loony, scary novel, but it has a tangible feel and it has affect, and that’s what I am coding as still real. Now, let’s compare that to Love Story. [crowd laughter]. One way to measure the historical distance we have come is by measuring the distance between Wuthering Heights and Love Story. I don’t know what you thought about the movie, but the book‘s real short. [crowd laughter]. And my own feeling was that him having a lot of money didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt a bit. There’s an immense distance that has been travelled by human subjectivity – humans as subjects – between Wuthering Heights and Love Story, and I hate to say it, there has been some distance travelled between Love Story and now, and movies like Heathers, Blade Runner, or just visiting Los Angeles. I mean, I don’t need to use examples, just visit Los Angeles. Just walk down the walk of stars at one o’clock in the morning, and ask yourself “Are these people really here, or is this central casting?” And it isn’t a funny question. And as our society develops in this telematic way, it’s not going to be funny to ask it around the Christmas dinner table about Uncle Henry, “Is that Uncle Henry, or is it just someone playing Uncle Henry? The further postmodern insight is: what difference does it make! See, that’s the thing Reagan’s handlers understood. It doesn’t make any difference! They’re buying it! Well, that’s all I have to say for now…
Philosophy and Post-Modern Culture (1990)
Transcript: A brief recap of the whole journey we have taken here. We tried to as it were retrace, sort of, the history of the accounts of human values given in the Western philosophical tradition. That account seemed to dead end with some rather ordinary philosophical problems. In other words, we found out that most of our accounts wouldn’t work too well, until we got to Hegel’s account, which reminded us that human values and moral and ethical problems come up in historical circumstances, which then forced us to investigate society and history, which opened up immense topics that we have only been able to say suggestive things about. Those topics are… we have addressed through these second set of lectures today. We have tried to address a few of them. Topics relating to the economy we have tried to… I tried to distil some of what I consider Marx… to be important insights Marx has into the economy, and others. In terms of the State, I didn’t assign any readings by Max Weber, but I did suggest you look at some Kafka on the State. Then I ended up with culture in the last lecture, and when I got around to culture today, you may have noticed that my remarks became less systematic. Now, I have got to explain why. And that’s that a culture based on spectacle and images has a peculiar non systematic character. It’s like the Fall TV schedule. All you really know about it, right, is that it is going to appear on a kind of grid. But culture in general, we are not even sure about the grid let alone, you know, which dumb new sitcom goes in it, but we are not sure about the grid. So, when you discuss cultural phenomena today, you almost have to go phenomena by phenomena to see how they fit. But it becomes crucially important for the kind of account I have been trying to give, that if the project is what I said it was in the sets of lectures before – trying to create a human life that is free and so on – it becomes crucially important if the culture itself is beginning to, as it were, destroy, deconstruct or disrupt the very conditions for being human at all. Because it becomes pointless to talk about free humans in the absence of humans. So, the problem of freedom was bad enough, right? Everybody went “I don’t think that can ever be done”, but by who, now is the question, which is even worse. So that’s been the trail that we have followed. Now, the only reason that I am mentioning Freud at all in these last lectures is to remind us, and take us back for a moment to Kierkegaard and deepen that analysis, where I did mention despair, and used a kind of existential motif to turn it into a social one. Despair not as, sort of, an existential thing like a Bergman movie, “The Seventh Seal“, or something, but as a social malady that is not merely psychological. Many of you have had the experience, I am sure, of going to a therapist and hearing them describe the problems you have with your husband and how you should adjust, and you go “Geez, I don’t think it’s that, I think it’s really the whole situation, you know, the fact that he has all the money and my life is shit, and I think that’s the problem” – we’ll cut that… anyway… – “My life is a mess, and that’s the problem”. Well those objective problems were what I was trying to show despair to be, and not ones that can be fixed, as it were, by simply, you know, having someone say: “adjust”. Well, this last part, where I am going to talk about Freud, is similarly not therapeutic, because that’s not the interesting part of Freud to me. The book I have suggested is “Civilisation and its Discontents“, which stands… which has nothing to do… doesn’t discuss at all Freud’s Oedipal drama, so there will be no talk of penis envy. I mean, whatever Freud may have thought about that, or why, I don’t care. This has to do with the processes that are, as it were – to follow a parallel kind of argument with Marx’s – much of human civilisation has been built by economic motivations of which people were culturally unaware. In other words, they have been motivated economically, but cultural meaning made them unaware of it. That’s a simple way to put one of Marx’s sort of sceptical arguments. A way to look at Nietzsche’s arguments could be to frame them in terms of the State, if you want to talk about power. They are motivated by principles of power, but ones of which we are unaware, sort of, of where they are rooted. To move to Freud, we will talk again about how our lives are motivated in ways of which we may be unaware, and in Freud, of course, the great discovery is the discovery of the unconscious. In a way, Freud’s work hinges on an insight that makes all of philosophy problematic. Freud was that thinker who reminded us that the conscious mind – which was the topic of philosophy, both in terms of cognitive things and values – is a very small part of our psychic life. Freud compares the conscious mind, in the book I have – I am talking about now – he compares the conscious mind to a… garrison. A captured, tiny garrison in an immense city. The city of Rome, with all its layers of history, all its archaic barbarisms, all its hidden avenues, covered over by civilization after civilization. And the conscious… That’s our mind, that whole thing. But the conscious part of it is that one garrison that’s clear, that sort of holds out in this captured city. A magnificent metaphor for all the surrounding motives, motivations, motifs, desires, that drive us – that are not philosophical – that cannot, even if we talk to our therapist a long time, all be brought up at once. Now, it is true that Freud’s goal, was that the “it“; the unconscious, the “id” – translated by Americans as the “id” – in German, the “it”, kind of a more… normal word. The “it” – the “id” – was to become conscious. Ego, the English word again being less spectacular: “I”, the “I”. I don’t know why translators do that, it’s to make the person sound like they are a scientist, you know. Freud says “it” and “I”, and we go “id” and “ego”. And all of a sudden it sounds like science. It’s not. It’s just a… it’s a myth, but a very interesting and fascinating one. So the goal of analytic treatment would be for those unreflected massive areas – again to go back to that metaphor of the city – to become part of the garrison as it spreads out to things we are clear about. In other words, it’s not a bad metaphor saying we shouldn’t be clear about who we are, and have an “I”, or a self, or a subject. Now, why am I bringing this up now? Well, to contrast it with my last remarks about culture, if the goal of psychoanalysis is that the unreflected parts of us become reflected, that the “it” become the “I”, then the goal of a mass simulational culture – and this is a remark that I am using from the Frankfurt school, don’t worry about it. The goal of a mass telecommunication culture is psychoanalysis in reverse. It’s that the little, last remaining parts of that garrison become unconscious. It’s precisely to reverse that process of enlightenment. Mass culture is enlightenment in reverse gear. Precisely to wipe out that last little garrison of autonomy. It is a constant assault upon it. That was why, and the last time I was out here, I approached it first from this religious angle of Kierkegaard’s, and characterised the assault as one that caused despair. Where despair was not a mood, but a structure that belongs to a captured garrison. Not an accidental feature of a captured garrison, but part of it. A structure of it. Fundamental to it. And so now, the reason to use the Freudian text is to remind us that the kind of culture I am talking about is simply to reverse that process that Freud saw as the goal of “talking it out”. Well, philosophy has always been a form of therapy in that sense. You all know that from nights when your life has felt like it wasn’t working and you got together with somebody you liked and you got drunk and you talked about “what did it all mean?”, or “what does it all mean?”, and you start talking it out. Well the goal of that is that those unreflected parts are to become reflected. The account I am giving of this mass telecommunication culture – postmodern culture – is that it’s goal is the opposite. That the “I” become “it”. That the parts that were just yours become general property. So that even if you are an idiosyncratic single woman, like “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd” again, which is a nice thing to be, but by the time you have watched a few of those, there is not much of you left that isn’t “it”. You can forget about it, it’s been understood, it’s now a part of the general property of everyone. I gave the example earlier, I’ll return to it for the fourth time, of the telephone sex. It’s just an amazing phenomenon to me. First of all, I can’t imagine anyone that bored, but in any case, there your deepest fantasies, which Freud was going to draw out in an analytic framework, now you just… that’s the way that something that was going to be “I”, you know, that special thing, no matter how perverse, and remember Freud… when something becomes reflected in Freud’s picture – it doesn’t mean… I mean, you may not know this – but even if it’s sick, you are supposed to remember it, and it is supposed to become part of the part of you that you know. So you dig up even really ugly memories, so that you can know them, and know them about yourself. It may not be pleasant, in fact it isn’t. But then again, that’s part of the pleasure principle of mass culture, is it does just the opposite. It takes socially uncomfortable memories, and takes them out of that clear garrison, and throws them into the wasteland around the city. In the way that elements of the culture of the late 60’s broke everyone’s heart. Because families were divided, the country was divided. No-one knew what kind of culture we should have after that, or during that. No-one knew who the heroes were. Whether it was the boys who were forced to fight the grunts down there, or Quaker pacifists who froze in jails in this city. No-one had the guts to choose, or the way to choose. So our culture since then – has been not just about the 60’s, but other great revolutionary moments, as I am not afraid to say – is in the process of continually burying and reburying them. Making them a part of the “it”, scattered out all around. I can go further back, based on my father’s memories. Great moments of rebellion like the populist movement around the turn of the century, The Knights of Labour, and so on. It’s the goal of a mass culture to bury that. It’s a goal of mass culture to take that part of a culture where we have begun to reflect and understand, and reverse it and make it unconscious. So, that’s the reason the discourse of Freud is important. It’s because the parts of our culture that we understand and can reflect on are just those tiny garrisons, [and] around it the mass of the culture. And one can think in our situation, of the tonnes of information, for example. This city probably has – this city we are in – you know, ten billion tonnes of paper on which are printed billions and billions and billions of words. Perfectly analogous to Freud’s unconscious. No-one is going to dig most of them up. Most of them have no meaning to anyone. The goal of mass culture is to make sure that the narratives of our lives fit somewhere in those documents. Just as fileable, malleable, and trainable as possible. During the break, at the end of the other lecture, I had another movie suggested to me that raises the possibility, in another way, and again in a way that would have bothered Freud, because for Freud… I mean similar with Proust, I don’t know if any of you read long books, like “Rememberance of Things Past“, but to the extent you remember the past you again expand the room of the “I”, the garrison, the little clear part of your head… dig it up from it’s buried past. So that’s the process working in the direction of enlightenment, which it can. It can work in that direction, but my argument has been that it is endangered in ways that we couldn’t suspect. The movie I have in mind here is Total Recall. In Total Recall, the character thinks throughout that he’s a revolutionary hero, and it all seems to be taking place in the conscious, clear garrison of the mind; the I; the conscious, clear place. As many of you who have seen Total Recall know however, the dream tape that he is on, which gives him real memories and avoids all… by the way, let me say this… don’t be too cynical about this. In Total Recall, it is true that the people that sold him the vacation are telling the truth about vacations. Vacations are a pain in the behind. They are a lot of trouble, and why not just come back after a few hours with all the right memories, but with no bug bites, and you know, no flat tyres, and then go on. So, it’s a good product. That’s the dialectic of the situation, you see, it’s also a good product. But after he has fought this great battle… and remember, this whole movie has taken place in this clear spot, right? It looks like an action movie. You’ll notice that the vacation he ended up buying was called “Blue Sky Over Mars”, which is how the movie ends, with these blue skies over Mars. You know, with memories like that, now he’s a revolutionary hero, and it’s conscious. See, it looks conscious. So the duplicity that Freud located in consciousness recurs in culture in an even more savage way. Because even in the most private parts of the “I”, where we think we are clearest, in principle we can’t be sure that they are not already invaded, inculturated, stamped, coded, filed, indexed. Not in a direct, crude way like in total recall, because television is already more subtle than that. Again, from my generational perspective things may look different, but, I, you know, I have to use it… you know, you can use yours when you want to, we can talk later! But from my generational perspective, it’s been a very bizarre experience to see your earlier life recreated as a kind of drama of a period in which you quasi-recognise yourself, but realise that they have invaded everything that meant anything to you and taken it over as a game like Trivial Pursuit, you know. It’s like… you know, like sitting in a nice cafe and hearing a Doors album on muzak, and some very important part of what made you who you are now has become unreflected to you, where you don’t even listen. In fact, listening is maybe where I want to stop, since I have talked so much, I would like stop maybe on the topic of listening. I have got a long time to talk about listening… paradox. But in a culture so overloaded, where we already suspect – if we don’t know – that it’s goal is psychoanalysis in reverse. To make the parts of us that think into ones that don’t. To just react, follow, or replicate. One thing that we can do, is tune out. So, many of us do that in one form or another. We take the culture and simply try to tune out as much of it as we can. But… there is a flaw in the strategy. And that’s that no culture ever was so pervasive. Even this word may be bothering you. There was a time when culture meant going to the things created by us folks, as opposed to nature. Where is nature now? There isn’t one. Everything has been inculturated. The most beautiful natural scenes there are, are the filmed ones that are created through fractogeometry at IBM. And it’s… I heard a great remark that the Swiss cuisine at Busch Gardens is better than the food in Switzerland… and more Swiss! You know, so, why bother to go? No reason! The food’s better, there’s a Swiss person, there’s some yodelling – I’ve been there! – the rest of it’s just clocks. Well, there’s a clock, you know. So this is a culture that… in a way, my critical remarks are beginning to break down, have you noticed that? Because now it looks as though that we are heading toward a society where you can plug yourself into it and it will meet your needs. Its… you can press in your needs into the machine, and it will meet them. Big screen TV, CD’s all around, every human need, maybe including the earlier one I discussed: the need [for] this radical freedom. I said I wanted to go out on a date with Kathleen Turner, well who knows… three dimensional replicant… punch it in, here she comes… hello. Since it’s a replicable image, you know… virtual reality suit, maybe they’ll be able to sell me that, and every other need for all of you, every one. But in the matrix of needs, in such a possible future system, as if it weren’t already kind of like that. Within such a possible future system, the only command or need that the machine would not respond to would be the one command that I have a feeling some of us would most want to type into the machine. Which is the demand that it destroy itself, you see, that would be my problem with the machine. It would meet all the needs except my need to see it destroyed. It would take every other command well, and meet every other need well, but the need to just shut it down. Television is something like that now. It will meet so many psychic needs and fulfil so many compensations… compensatory things for you. We all know how it feels after a day at work to turn on our familiar show. I am not making fun of it. It feels the same for me. Oh, Cheers again, I’ve seen this one! Phew… and you’re out of it for a while. It’s just this [makes zoned out gesture]. But the one command you can’t order from the television – or the show you can’t get – is the one that blows all the TVs in the world up. It won’t do that. The demand even to turn it off is ridiculous. It’s a ridiculous thing. They go “Oh, you can just turn it off”, yeah, on pain of falling out of anything that even resembles the resemblance of reality. I didn’t say resembles reality, but resembles its resemblance. You don’t watch TV for two weeks in this country and you walk around going “What happened???”. Well, you know damn well, the same old stuff! But you still feel disconnected. You know, it’s been bad here in Georgetown, you don’t have cable here. I’m going “NO CABLE??? You know, how backward are these people! Do you guys cook, you know, over open fires? I mean, you got no cable? This close to the Whitehouse and no cable?”. So I had to walk up to a bartender and I said how was the war going and he goes “Still winning”. Well I knew that! [crowd laughter]. I knew it without watching it. A priori, we are always going to be still winning. That’s an a priori truth about the war. I can guarantee you that. Every day the news will be the same: “We are winning”. How about that? See, I can predict things based on my theory. We are going to win. See, it’s a good prediction. We’ll win. In any case, this may sound too cynical. I have tried to… well, of course it sounds too cynical, but it’s sort of hard… to feel bad about that, about ending up in a kind of cynical spot. Because the handlers and the various… You know, the handlers of the systems of mass culture could not possibly be more cynical than they are; both about public taste, about how they… about their own complicity with power. I’d love to see a news report that says: “Oh by the way, we are speaking for the people who run your life, don’t worry about it”… “This news report is not true”… Then we go: “Oh good, I am going to watch the not true news report…” [crowd laughter]. So, I mean, don’t kill the messenger, you get it? I didn’t build that system. I am just trying to describe it to you. The description of it sounds cynical, [but] on the other side of it there is a possible kind of freedom… on the other side of it. I don’t know how to describe it, or how to even evoke it. But it’s clear that where we can make systems of this complexity; cultural systems, economic systems, machines and so on – of this complexity – surely we can make the world that could first meet those needs that I described that everyone should have, and then perhaps meet needs that people have only dreamed of, like the need for some autonomy and freedom. The need for that little space up there, the “I” part, to expand a little bit, just a little. With the full knowledge that you are going to still be a fallible, finite human. It’s still… a reasonable thing, to want some parts of your life to be clear and reflected. That’s still reasonable to want. Even in the face of knowing that the full achievement of that is fairly unlikely. For Freud, civilisation was a drama between two principles: eros and thanatos, or to use Woody Allen’s more normal words: love and death. And in this book, this last book I am discussing, Freud paints a beautiful and quick panorama of civilisation as being a struggle between these two – what he calls – eternal principles. Well, on the account I have been giving, the mechanisms of one side have clearly gained the upper hand. Just clearly. It’s not… on that I really don’t think it’s that debatable. But one can expect, as Freud admitted – in an hour in a history… in a time in the history of the world as dark as this one – Freud admitted that it could be expected perhaps that the other adversary, eternal eros might come in and strike a blow for the other side, that the mechanisms of death and forgetfulness, which are very closely aligned… final death [make dying gesture], death and forgetfulness, very close. That it might be expected that eros would have a… make a comeback. Possibly. That’s not much of a “keep hope alive” message in a culture… like this one. Especially as it threatens to become global. Under conditions where many of the people in other parts of the world that receive our culture will do so with extreme naivete. In Eastern Europe they’ll believe we have got a democracy. They will love to have a VCR, and with each step forward they will become more entrapped in the same totalitarian system that is much more subtle than the crude and simple one that many of them have overthrown. What a joy to overthrow a crude and simple totalitarian system. I mean all of us enjoyed that, right? Dancing on the wall was fun, because that system was so crude, and not postmodern enough. They didn’t understand that there are walls that you can build that cannot be seen between people. Those are harder walls to overthrow, the walls they build between different races and classes and sexes in our society. Those walls are much more difficult to overthrow than crude and stupid walls like The Great Wall of China, which doesn’t wall anybody out, it just walls you in. But the stupid forms of totalitarianism build these walls in a way that people can storm them. The global system that I am talking about, not is already here, perhaps, but is on its way. Perhaps. About the present and future you can just guess. I mean, you know, that’s what scientists do too, make their best guess. You can just guess. But about this system, the walls will be much harder to storm, because they won’t be the kind that will be available for storming. Hard to storm the walls on TV, in fact you’ll already – like in Total Recall – have the feeling you have already stormed them. You’ve already… I mean, you know, the guy in Total Recall, well, he has already won the revolution, it’s cool. He did it in ten minutes sitting in a chair injected with the same emotions. Those kind of walls and that kind of totalitarianism I suspect many people in the world don’t suspect is the dark side of the American dream. I hope you… I hope there will be forms of resistance, but the basis for that hope today is slim. I’d be less than honest if I said it was more than slim. I expect, and with Freud hope that the final word hasn’t been said. I don’t think that in a way it is a part of this system that final words are sayable. Even in this system. And I will have to say this about it. That it has to reinject – and I haven’t got a good argument for this in the time remaining – it does have to reinject resistance into it in some form or another. It’s important that it at least put up a simulation of opposition. That’s why the most powerful anti war movement America could have now, would be for the last few of us that are against the war to just disappear completely so it looks like those polls are 100%, and many of my friends have started throwing off the poll numbers and joining the pro demonstrators, because the worst statement we could make about our democracy is to be unanimously for something, which will make it self evident that it’s no democracy. So the most radical… See, in our culture, our struggles will have to become more sophisticated. Instead of fighting Bush, maybe the best way to fight him is to agree with him and say: “Hell yes, bomb them all”, and get right with them. Talk all of your wildest friends into it, say yeah… because once 100%, that’s saturation. No opposition? Bush will go “What will we do for a TV spot?”. They’ll have to start hiring the CIA to go out and demonstrate. They would, well it seems they would. There’s no opposition. That’s what we use to say we are a democracy, the opposition. So there will be all kinds of new strategies, and I have not yet given up on that last remaining spots of clarity that are around in the world. To quote George Bush: “Those thousand points of light”. Well it might turn out that they might not be what he suspects. I am just not willing quite yet – and I don’t know, I guess your questions will be “why not?” – to write radical democracy‘s final obituary. And yet… and this is the point where I have to say I don’t have an argument. It’s taken me a long time. I just don’t have an argument about why not to write its final obituary. I have seen too much of this last… especially the last fifteen years or so – of Reagan and Bush – not to feel like writing that last obituary for radical democracy, or even for these private moments that I have tried to steal from this text where we have that clear thought in our own mind and we are sure it’s not the unreflected part being produced by our culture. I am not quite, even under these conditions, ready to write the final obituary. I don’t have any argument, but I at least… I have this much going for it. It’s… now, I am really going to go back to an archaic text called the New Testament. Going to have a good revolutionary argument to hook you with at the end. I mean in a way, that’s why I said “preaching”, I feel like Paul before the Corinthians, and they were all real cynical, and I can see that I’m pretty cynical, you’re pretty cynical, St Paul was pretty cynical. All the Corinthians were going “This resurrection in the body stuff…”, kind of like how some of you may go “This radical democracy stuff?”… “What do you mean resurrection in the body?”… “What do you mean freedom, radical democracy, enlightenment? What the hell are you talking about?”. Well if you read the… read Corinthians, it’s very strange. The people at Corinth are really questioning Paul… very tough, you know “Resurrection in what body? When I was 16? 15? 14? Where will I be”, and stuff. Well please… this is my last reading assignment, and it’s a widely known text… its The Bible. Look at Paul’s answer in Corinthians. It’s a masterpiece of sophistry, rhetoric, and bitter invective. No arguments, because how could you have an argument for such a utopian thing, you couldn’t. But Paul does have one consideration that is very persuasive to the Corinthians: that if this hope goes, everything goes with it. It’s a desperate form of argument, but these are desperate times. If the hope goes to reconstruct our lives in that way, everything else will go with it. Everything. And not in that neat, fun way like the apocalypse, where you all get to Rod Serling yourselves out together and me too, but everything human will go too. So, if there is no other reason to hope that things will change, then hope was after all, all we were given in the first place, for those who were hopeless. Hope was given for the sake of the hopeless, not for people who are comfortable. Philosophy, as I said, does not provide comfort for people who are comfortable, it shouldn’t. It doesn’t even provide comfort for the afflicted as you may have found out if you are afflicted. It is – as I tried to warn you when I started – disconsolate in principle. Hegel says it in a scarier way. He says “Dialectics (or philosophy) does not run from death and devastation, but it tarries with it a while and looks it in the face”. So that’s all I have tried to do with our culture in this last couple of hours, which may have seemed strange to some of you, you may think “Oh, things aren’t that bad because after all the TVs are still running, the people are for it, and everybody is happy, and I’ll go back to my normal life”. Unfortunately, giving talks like this is a part of my normal life, eww. But don’t forget as you watch the TV that the fires of Belsen burn in the TV tubes every night. Don’t forget that the structural principles of our society are as barbaric in their structure as they ever were, perhaps more so… perhaps more so. We have to remember we are talking at a historical moment when most folks want to nuke somebody again and why not!
Are You a Bromide?: The Sulphitic Theory Expounded and Exemplified According to the Most Recent Researches into the Psychology of Boredom, Including Many Well-Known Bromidioms Now in Use